WSJ 2

see tag and main node

SEE THREE 1 25

owned by murdoch; post-insurr reckoning?

maybe neglected b/c i'm no long surprised?

pro corp

capt 419

badish code, bak

html henceforth

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How do I access the Wall Street Journal from home? - Quick Answers sjpl

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One Fox contributor called out RFK Jr.’s “lifetime spreading misinformation.” Fox's evening lineup then gushed over him.

Written by Isabella Corrao

Research contributions from John Whitehouse

Published 01/30/25 mma

On the first day of anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of Health and Human Services — where the nominee showed he doesn't understand how Medicaid works — most Fox News figures spent the evening fawning over Kennedy, despite his history of misinformation.

Meanwhile, other Rupert Murdoch-owned outlets are sounding the alarm about Kennedy's lack of qualifications, with one Wall Street Journal editorial board member appearing on Fox to emphasize that Kennedy “has spent a lifetime spreading misinformation.”

Fox News contributor Jason Riley: Kennedy “has spent a lifetime spreading misinformation"

On Special Report, Wall Street Journal columnist and Fox News contributor Jason Riley noted that Kennedy “has spent a lifetime spreading misinformation and enriching himself and trial lawyers by spreading this misinformation. I don’t think he’s the right person for the job.”

Video

From the January 29, 2025, edition of Fox News'Special Report with Bret Baier

The Wall Street Journal editorial page also called out Kennedy’s “clear conflict of interest” in making money on lawsuits against drug companies while head of HHS as flat-out “disqualifying”:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to root out corruption between industry and government. Yet the man who wants to be the nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services refused to rule out personally making money from lawsuits against drug makers. This ought to be disqualifying.

...

Mr. Kennedy’s disclosures show that he has received more than $2.5 million from law firms that have sued drug and vaccine makers. He also has a financial stake in a pending lawsuit against human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine maker Merck. Mr. Kennedy’s trial-lawyer ties and financial interests in litigation against drug makers pose a clear conflict of interest.

Indeed, Murdoch outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have been some of the loudest critics of Kennedy's nomination, drawing criticism from the likes of Steve Bannon.

### Criticism for Kennedy from within right-wing media followed a hearing in which Kennedy showed ignorance on basic issues

Nearly 100 million low-income Americans rely on Medicaid for their health care coverage, but it is one of many programs on the chopping block as Republicans prepare a massive bill aimed at cutting taxes for the rich. During his hearing, Kennedy showed ignorance of how Medicaid works. Perhaps the most devastating line of questioning came from a Republican senator:

> Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., repeatedly pressed Kennedy about proposed changes to the program and for his thoughts about Medicaid reform.

“Republicans, again, are looking at ways to potentially reform Medicaid to help pay for President Trump’s priorities,” Cassidy said. “What thoughts do you have regarding Medicaid reform?”

“Most people who are on Medicaid are not happy,” Kennedy responded. “The premiums are too high, the deductibles are too high, the networks are narrow.”

A 2023 poll from KFF, a nonprofit group that researches health policy issues, found that a majority of Americans have “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” views of the program. He made similar comments about the Affordable Care Act.

People on Medicaid generally aren’t charged premiums or deductibles at all.

Kennedy also reportedly made false or misleading claims about vaccines, chronic disease in children, and even his own previous remarks — such as when he was caught on video in 2023 pushing the deranged conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was “targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people” and exclude Jewish and Chinese people.

Kennedy has a troubling history of pushing false claims about public health and safety. He long has argued that “autism comes from vaccines,” despite many peer-reviewed studies concluding there is no link.

In 2019, then the chairman of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children Health’s Defense, Kennedy traveled to the country Samoa and seemingly took advantage of two babies’ deaths resulting from improperly administered measles vaccines to emphasize the supposed dangers of vaccines and discourage vaccination efforts. Eighty-three people died from measles and thousands were sickened in the outbreak that subsequently swept Samoa.

### Before and after Riley's remarks, Fox News hosts gushed over Kennedy

Despite Kennedy's record of pushing misinformation and his questionable performance in the hearing — and despite the record of criticism of Kennedy from Murdoch outlets — Fox News’ biggest hosts unabashedly celebrated his nomination after the first hearing:

- Fox News host Will Cain condemned Democrats who criticized Kennedy: “It’s quite shocking to see some stand there today, defend the status quo, and destroy — attempt to destroy — a reformer.” He added that Kennedy “believes in a role for vaccines.” Fox News, *The Will Cain Show*, [1/29/25]

- The Fiveco-host Jeanine Pirro praised Kennedy as a “radical” who is “exactly who we need.” She also downplayed Democrats’ concerns about Kennedy’s nomination: “Why all of the sudden is this guy subjected to all kinds of craziness?” Fox News, *The Five*, [1/29/25]

- While host Greg Gutfeld cautioned that Kennedy’s view on vaccines seem “more reliant on his gut instinct than science,” he still praised him, saying he’s “passionate, he’s persuasive, he’s open-minded,” and he's “not woke.” He noted that Kennedy “does raise good points” and “we need people to raise questions.” Fox News, *The Five*, [1/29/25]

- Host Laura Ingraham argued that Democrats are “scrambling to take down the nomination of a true health care crusader.” She further defended Kennedy: “What RFK Jr. lacks in managerial experience, he makes up for with an unwavering dedication to improving America's spiraling health with more commonsense approaches.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [1/29/25]

- Host Jesse Watters praised Kennedy as the “the only one with the skills, knowledge, and experience to get inside of this government and help America reverse this chronic disease epidemic.” He continued, “Our citizens voted to make America great and healthy again.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [1/29/25]

- Host Sean Hannity said Kennedy did an “amazing job on Capitol Hill.” He defended the nomination by claiming, “We can't be strong if

op ed ~ j6 pardons but

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an 1 25

The editorial board of The Wall Street Journalvented its frustration Thursday that Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is still in his post at the end of the first week of U.S. President Donald Trump's second White House term.

"Why Is Rohit Chopra Still Employed at the CFPB?" reads the headline of an editorial the Journal published late Thursday, hours after the Chopra-led bureau announced that it is opening a docket for public comment on credit card interest rates and other terms.

"Americans owe well over $1 trillion in credit card debt, and many feel crushed by sky-high interest and fees," Chopra wrote in a social media post Thursday morning.

Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement that "the only groups opposing this effort are big banks and credit card companies, which would rather see the agency sit idly by as they rake in excess profits from consumers through fees and interest rates that often surpass 30%."

Chopra was chosen by former President Joe Biden to lead the CFPB, a frequent target of attacks from Republicans and Trump allies, including billionaire Elon Musk. During his first White House stint, Trump attempted to gut the CFPB by installing an opponent of the bureau to lead it.

But while Chopra has packed up his office in Washington, D.C., Trump has yet to fire the CFPB chief—a fact that is reportedly making Wall Street nervous.

The Journal's editorial board, a reliable mouthpiece for big business, complained Thursday that Chopra "has spent his tenure advancing progressive hobbyhorses, including rules that ban medical debt on consumer credit reports and cap bank overdraft fees."

The editorial goes on to claim, citing anonymous sources, that Chopra has "sought to ingratiate himself with [Vice President] JD Vance in hopes of serving out his term," which officially ends in October 2026.

News reports suggest that Trump's team has "struggled to make selections to replace" Chopra—a difficulty that one watchdog said is unsurprising.

"Being the hatchet person for the sort of chiselers and grifters that the CFPB fights against is not exactly a fun job—especially as some elements within MAGA could potentially call you out," Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project toldThe American Prospect.

In a column on Friday, the Prospect's David Dayen wrote that Chopra's continued presence at the helm of the CFPB is "freaking Wall Street out."

"Though it was expected that he would be quickly let go, his office continues to be active," Dayen noted. "On Tuesday, CFPB announced a settlement with Argus Information and Advisory Services, a TransUnion subsidiary, CFPB contractor, and serial violator of several financial and data privacy laws. Argus agreed to not seek any contracts with CFPB for five years. Then on Thursday, CFPB released a report showing growing instances of auto repossessions, well above the pre-pandemic level."

Over the past four years, the Chopra-led CFPB "managed to put over $6 billion back into the pockets of Americans," according to the Consumer Federation of America.

But Dayen wrote that "if Chopra continues to make life miserable for financial operators and oligarchs—Big Tech has been one of his main concerns—the pressure to dump him will grow."

"It's just amusing that the time hasn't come yet," Dayen added. "Amid all the other wreckage, watching Wall Street squirm a bit is at least a tiny bit of solace."

===

an 1 25

Donald Trump’s ambitious demand that the United States regain control of the Panama Canal would be “a mess” for the country, according to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which added that it is just the latest example of the incoming president’s “bully tactic diplomacy.”

Trump’s “America First” agenda was on full display during a disjointed news conference Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort, where he turned heads for again repeating his desire for the U.S. to acquire Canada, Panama and Greenland.

But the trick to deciphering Trump’s remarks “is figuring out when Mr. Trump is trolling and when he means it,” the Journal’s conservative editorial board wrote Wednesday.

“A Greenland deal has potential if he’s artful. Panama would be a mess, and his Canada trolling could hurt the Conservatives,” according to the board. “Mr. Trump often prefers to talk tough, but using the bully pulpit to bully America’s friends is no help against the real bad guys.”

Trump told reporters Tuesday that “the Panama Canal is vital to our country,” adding that it was “a big mistake” for the U.S. to sign over the canal in a treaty under former President Jimmy Carter. But his tough talk on Panama seemed to be a bridge too far for the board, which noted that the president-elect refused to take using military force off the table.

“If he means that, he’s asking for trouble,” the board wrote in their op-ed. “It would turn an ally in the Western Hemisphere into an adversary. Does he want a forever guerrilla war?”

The Journal’s editorial board suggested that Trump’s threats may be aimed at a deal on canal fees “or maybe the Panamanian ports managed by a Hong Kong entity.”

“But he’s simply making it up that Chinese soldiers are running the canal,” the board wrote in a fact check of Trump’s claims the canal is being operated by Chinese soldiers.

They concluded that Trump – who famously penned “The Art of the Deal” with ghostwriter Tony Schwartz – would benefit from a piece of his advice.

“One possible option might be a defense free association compact with Greenland, similar to U.S. arrangements with Pacific island states,” the board wrote. “The subtle art of persuasion would be required.”

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an 12 24

Mona Charen, now 67, has been a part of conservative journalism since 1979, when the National Review hired her as an editorial assistant. Charen has been a prominent figure on the right, working as a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan during the 1980s and penning books with titles like "Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First" and "Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)."

But Charen, a blistering critic of President-elect Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, supported Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. And she has made no secret of her view that Trumpism has had an extremely negative influence on the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 17, Charen blames "Trumpian populism" for the "decline of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page."

"Sure, I understand that the Journal probably always rubbed progressives the wrong way, and perhaps that limits how much they can see the precipitous drop in the paper's standards," Charen argues. "But it seems clear to me that in the pre-Trump era, the paper had some integrity. While the board was broadly aligned with the Republican Party, its editorials didn't hesitate to differ with Republicans on major questions."

Charen continues, "The Journal was consistently pro-immigration, for example, strongly free-trade, and moderate on social issues like abortion and gay rights. It was a platform for serious writers and informed opinion. And even now, it still has flashes of its old self now and then. But those only underscore the sad corruption of a once great institution."

The former Nancy Reagan speechwriter cites the WSJ editorial board's endorsement of far-right conspiracy theorist Kari Lake in Arizona's 2022 gubernatorial race as a glaring example of their willingness to promote extremists.

"In the Trump era," Charen laments, "the Journal has become, if not Pravda, then something like The Nation. The Nation reliably whitewashed the sins of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes because it regarded anti-communism as a greater threat to the world than communism itself."

Charen adds, "Similarly, the Wall Street Journal has gradually become a parody of itself on the grounds that Democrats are always and forever the greatest threat to the country. With that guiding principle, there is simply no Republican, no matter how deranged or unfit, whom the Journal will not prefer to a Democratic opponent."

*Mona Charen's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

an 11 24

The editors of the conservative Wall Street Journal are warning former President Donald Trump against carrying out a recently leaked scheme to purge the American military of senior officers.

In an editorial about Trump's nomination of Fox News personality Pete Hegseth to lead the United States Department of Defense, the editors urged Trump to act with caution when it comes to plans to shake up the military brass.

"The military isn’t Mr. Trump’s enemy, and a purge mentality will court political trouble and demoralize the ranks," the editorial board argued. "The draft executive order, leaked to the press, about forming a group of former officers to rule on the fitness of current generals would be a mistake that smacks of politicizing the officer corps."

The editorial also argued against taking out his anger against former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley on other military leaders.

"Firing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs CQ Brown would also be counterproductive," they wrote. "Mr. Trump is still furious about former Chairman Mark Milley’s criticisms, and not without cause, but Mr. Trump promoted Gen. Milley. The better path is to look for officers who understand the current global dangers and have good ideas for what to do about it. Adm. Sam Paparo of the U.S. Indo-Pacific command is one."

The editors also expressed concern that Hegseth seems to be obsessed with purging any "woke" elements from the American military rather than focusing on more immediate and concrete problems.

"In the context of America’s security challenges, wokeness is a small concern," they argued.

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poynter inst

November 1, 2024

No surprise. The Wall Street Journal ran the first of two editorials on the major party presidential contenders Wednesday night, while also confirming that it will continue its 92-year-old tradition of not endorsing.

First up was Kamala Harris; thoughts on Donald Trump to follow soon. The Journal offered a mixed-to-negative review under the headline, “A Harris Victory Means a Fourth Obama Term.”

The editorial attacked her as a free spender on an array of domestic programs and said it lacked confidence in how she would handle a “dangerous moment” in foreign affairs. It gave a nod to her running a capable campaign on short notice and trouncing Trump in the debate. The editorial writers also sympathized with Republicans who are breaking with their party because of their loathing of Trump.

The Journal’s voluminous opinion section has seemingly been at war with itself since Harris entered the race, going back and forth about whether to fear more her “progressive” policies or Trump’s erratic behavior, worsening as the campaign goes on.

Even without an endorsement, the pair of essays could hint at how the Journal would like to see you vote. Benjamin Mullin, now a New York Times media reporter, pinpointed in a 2016 Poynter story that a skewering of Hillary Clinton was a Trump recommendation in disguise.

The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today have earned varying degrees of angry pushback from staff and readers for not endorsing. The Journal’s predictability will keep the peace among those constituencies. You could argue that the Journal’s approach of letting the voter decide without a thumb on the scale was the way to go right along.

I’ll offer a mild dissent. “We haven’t endorsed since Herbert Hoover” is catchy but also evasive. Isn’t that just a dressed-up version of the dispiriting “we’ve always done it that way” excuse?

The Journal also kept readers happy for decades by running acres of stock tables. Then that didn’t make sense anymore and they stopped.

Diamonds are forever, but why, exactly, are nonendorsements, too?

===

10 24 op ed odious on?

Opinion | Weekend Interview: Trump Tangles With the Journal’s Editors

New York. “What does The Wall Street Journal know?” Donald Trump sneered on Tuesday at the Economic Club of Chicago.

.6 days ago

WSJ

Opinion | Playing the Führer Card

Is Sen. Bob Casey a closet fan of Adolf Hitler? How about Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin? We ask because both Senate Democrats are running ads...

.24 hours ago

Playing the Führer Card

Senate Democrats associate with a man fellow Democrats claim is like Adolf Hitler.

The Editorial Board

Oct. 24, 2024 5:50 pm ET

Wonder Land: Democratic Senate candidates, including Bob Casey, Tammy Baldwin, Jon Tester, Elissa Slotkin and Sherrod Brown are drifting into Trumpian MAGA land. Photo: Composite: Mark Kelly

Is Sen. Bob Casey a closet fan of Adolf Hitler? How about Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin? We ask because both Senate Democrats are running ads as part of their re-election campaigns that associate themselves with Donald Trump. And they’re doing this even as fellow Democrats and the press corps are suggesting that Mr. Trump admires Hitler and has similar dictatorial ambitions.

Opinion: Free Expression

Free Expression

Is Donald Trump Closing In on Victory?

No doubt both Senators despise the German mass murderer. But if Mr. Trump is so horrific, how can they have any kind of political association with him? Their ads cite issues on which they agree with Mr. Trump in an attempt to burnish their bipartisan image. But surely they don’t want to do anything to promote the election of a “semi-fascist” (President Biden’s description), or a “fascist” (Kamala Harris), or a wannabe Führer of an American Reich.

Then again, maybe Democrats don’t really believe what they’re saying about Mr. Trump. If they did, they might not have worked so hard to help him win the GOP nomination by indicting him so he could get the sympathy of partisans. “They’re not after me, they are after you,” Mr. Trump liked to say during the Republican primaries, to good political effect.

There are many reasons to worry about how Mr. Trump might wield power in a second term—not least that he wouldn’t be able to govern successfully and would thus set up the progressive left for huge gains in 2026 and 2028.

WSJ

Opinion | The ‘Fascist’ Meme Returns

Why the public isn't buying this Democratic claim about Trump.

.5 days ago

The ‘Fascist’ Meme Returns

Why the public isn’t buying this Democratic claim about Trump.

The Editorial Board

Oct. 20, 2024 4:58 pm ET

Journal Editorial Report: Harris does Fox and the race still tightens. Photo: Dustin Chambers/Reuters

No doubt it was inevitable. As Election Day nears, and the progressive panic over Donald Trump escalates, Democrats are closing their campaign with a favorite theme: Mr. Trump is a threat to the Constitution, to democracy itself, and is even a “fascist.” But is this true, and could he really impose authoritarian rule in the U.S.?

Opinion: Potomac Watch

WSJ Opinion Potomac Watch

The Ballot Referendums: Taxes, Crime, Abortion and Rent Control

The fascist meme is all over the place, an upgrade from President Biden’s description of the MAGA movement in 2022 as “semi-fascist.” MSNBC interviews earnest academics who draw a straight historical line between mid-20th-century Europe and the 21st-century GOP. A writer for The Atlantic takes the hyperbole prize with a headline that says Mr. Trump is talking like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Why leave out Chairman Mao?

Kamala Harris is also hitting the theme. Mr. Trump “is seeking unchecked power,” she told a crowd this week in Pennsylvania. “Listen to General [Mark] Milley, Donald Trump’s top general. He has called Trump, and I quote, ‘fascist to the core,’ and said, quote, ‘No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.’ ”

Let’s stipulate that there are many reasons to be wary of handing Mr. Trump power again. His rhetoric is often coarse and divisive. His praise for the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is offensive, and betrays his view that he can by force of personality cut favorable deals with them. He indulges mediocrities who flatter him, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election was disgraceful. These columns preferred any other Republican nominee....

WSJ

The Economic Risk of Donald Trump’s Tariff Plans - Opinion: Potomac Watch - WSJ Podcasts

Donald Trump is promising a universal 10% to 20% tariff on all imports to the U.S., plus perhaps 60% on China. Together this could push U.S....

.1 day ago

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Opinion | The Harris Disguise, Energy Edition

Camila Thorndike, the VP's climate director, reveals her real agenda.

.23 hours ago

WSJ

Opinion | A Mess at the International Criminal Court

The prosecutor pursuing Israeli leaders is accused of sexual harassment. The facts cry out for an investigation.

.1 day ago

WSJ

Opinion | The Other Party Isn’t the Enemy

At a March GOP meeting in my congressional district, I said, “I am a Christian first, an American second, and then a Republican.

.1 month ago

WSJ

Opinion | What Real Russian Interference Looks Like

The Kremlin works to defeat pro-Western leaders in Moldova and Georgia.

.2 days ago

WSJ

Opinion | Biden-Harris Mismanaged Hurricane Helene

A White House that tried to shift FEMA's priorities left the citizens of North Carolina suffering for days.

.2 weeks ago

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WSJ Opinion: Hits and Misses of the Week

Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Peterson and Dan Henninger. Photo: Julia Nikhinson/Associated...

.Jun 30, 2024

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maybe premATURE, 1 DAY?

Newspaper front pages continue to bury Trump’s former chief-of-staff saying the former president is a fascist who praised Hitler

Only the Los Angeles Times focused a front-page article on John Kelly describing Trump as “the general definition of fascist” and saying he praised Hitler. The New York Times buried its own scoop.

Written by Courtney Hagle

Published 10/24/24 12:33 PM MMA

This week, The New York Times reported that former President Donald Trump’s former chief-of-staff John Kelly said Trump is a fascist, that he has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, and that he repeatedly denigrated soldiers and the military. The Los Angeles Times was the only one of five top U.S. newspapers to focus a front-page article on Kelly’s comments, while the Times continued to bury its own scoop.

The Times’ report, drawn from multiple interviews with Kelly, marked Kelly’s most extensive on-the-record comments about Trump. He detailed Trump’s “dictator approach to government” and concerning disregard for the Constitution, confirmed that Trump has made disparaging comments about the military and wounded soldiers, and spoke about Trump claiming that “Hitler did some good things.”

As Media Matters reported yesterday, the morning after the story broke, it was not covered on the print front pages of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, or The New York Times.

Today, the story was adequately covered only on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, with the headline “Ex-aide: Trump is unfit, ‘fascist’.” The Washington Post discussed the comment in a piece focused on Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris calling out Trump, titled “Harris, in escalation, calls Trump a fascist.” As journalist Adam Serwer noted, the frame served to position Kelly’s comments as an “aside in a bigger story framed as a partisan attack by his rival.”

The Wall Street Journal and USA Today did not cover the news on their front pages at all. Neither did The New York Times, which placed its own reporting on A12 of today’s print edition. [PIX OF FT PAGES]

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an 8 24

Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Gerard Baker on Monday delivered a brutal assessment of former President Donald Trump's recent performances on the campaign trail headlined, "Trump is looking like a loser again."

After giving Trump some credit for doing apress conference last week at Mar-a-Lago while also slamming Vice President Kamala Harris for avoiding such interactions with the media, Baker dove into the substance of Trump's remarks — and determined it was not good.

"By my calculation, about one-third of Mr. Trump’s remarks fell into three categories: false, obtuse or lunatic," Baker wrote. "I’m not even talking here about the usual grotesque hyperbolic assertions or baffling verbal manufactures, the finest of which last week was surely the description of 'people dying financially because they can’t buy bacon.'"

ALSO READ:['Catastrophic error': Peter Navarro begs Trump to 'reset' campaign after Harris takes lead

The most flagrant example, argued Baker, was Trump's untrue story about being in a near-death helicopter ride with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

To make matters worse, added Baker, this behavior wasn't just a one-off incident.

"This is all of a piece with his recent behavior — from his claim that Joe Biden will be back as the Democratic candidate to his insistence that the crowds at Ms. Harris’s rallies are enhanced by artificial intelligence," he notes.

"This is the problem. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the presidency in 2020. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the House in 2018 and the Senate in the Georgia runoff election in January 2021."

Baker is dismissive of Harris as a politician, but he warns that if Trump continues with his usual tricks, voters may feel they have no choice but to elect her anyway.

"This is the same old Mr. Trump, but this time he is up against something the American people are being sold as new," he warned. "Those of us who have paid attention may know that Ms. Harris is a seasoned hard-liner with extreme views, but most voters don’t.

They see a blank slate onto which they are being invited to project anything they like Mr. Trump’s performances as he traipses around the country again are reinforcing the illusion of that choice. Instead of telling them consistently and repeatedly what they are actually getting if they vote Democrat, he is merely reminding them what they will get again if they vote Republican."

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1 24 ymail

Trump henchman and former Attorney General Bill Barr has just published a propaganda piece in the right-wing opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, accusing MoveOn of engaging in an unlawful, Russian-style criminal conspiracy against American democracy and supporting efforts to investigate No Labels' "most serious allegations" against us.²

Barr is attacking MoveOn for organizing to expose a plot by No Labels, a billionaire-backed dark-money political slush fund, and their effort that would reinstall Trump in the White House.

We won't be silenced. But MoveOn's 2024 budget did not account for a potential legal fight with a billionaire-backed organization, and now it's escalating with Trump's former attorney general calling on the Justice Department—which he used to lead—to investigate the baseless allegations.

Although the allegations have no merit, now that Barr has raised them in The Wall Street Journal, we frankly cannot fully anticipate what may happen next, as the attack on MoveOn gets even more of a foothold among MAGA leaders and the MAGA movement. As we enter a critical election year, we cannot afford to pull a cent away from our campaign to defeat Trump and stop his fascist plans. Which is where you come in.

Barr will make any argument—no matter how absurd—to distract from the fact that No Labels is a dark-money group, funded by Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch; Harlan Crow, a Nazi memorabilia collector and benefactor of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's lavish lifestyle; billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, a major Trump backer; and other donors whose identities remain secret.^3,4,5

In Maine, there were numerous complaints of No Labels misleading voters, tricking them into changing their party registration.6 And, in Rhode Island, No Labels' petition papers were referred to the local police department because their organizers may have forged the signatures of dead people.⁷ Dead people!

Barr is silent on all of that. Instead, the same man who misled the nation about the Mueller report, dropped federal charges against Trump ally Michael Flynn, and personally ordered police and federal agents to clear out innocent protesters outside the White House, accuses MoveOn and our allies of pushing America to be more like Russia.^8,9,10

Of course, this is no surprise. The constant drumbeat of attacks is part of a billionaire-backed effort to exhaust, intimidate, and harass us into silence—and to force critics like us, those who are speaking truth to power, to drain their financial resources.

Expect far, far more of this if Trump gets a second term. We can't let it happen. And with your help, we won't.

Billionaires already buy our elections—in secret and with few limits since the Citizens United ruling.

The Wall Street Journal piece is just another example of how Trump and his henchmen want to have it both ways: They want to illegally funnel unlimited sums from secret fat-cat donors into our electoral system but then cry out for "democracy," "fairness," and rights for "rival political parties" when it suits their interests.

Expect far more hypocrisy and yes, investigations of MoveOn and others on the left if Trump gets a second term. It's terrifying but true. We will never back down, but the best defense is a good offense.

MoveOn's 2024 budget did not account for the potential legal costs to come. These costs could be astronomical, and the legal proceedings could take years, but we cannot allow this billionaire-backed effort, which is just a small preview of what a second Trump term would look like, to distract us in an election year where MoveOn must go all-in to defeat Trump and stop his fascist plans in their tracks...

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MURDOCH 2ND TRY EG FOX? new ct jack s

https://www.alternet.org/wall-street-journal-gop-trump/

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COMMENTARY

Opinion: Will the World Bank Choose Climate Change Over Poverty?

A new G-20 report calls for raising $3 trillion and spending only a fraction of it to help the poor.

Bjorn Lomborg

October 6, 2023 06:10 pm ET

Appeared in the Oct 07, 2023 , print edition as 'Will the World Bank Choose Climate Change Over Poverty?'

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“Climate-Fund Plan Poses Wealth of Risks” (World News, Sept. 26) is right to consider unintended adverse effects. While debt burdens that widen economic disparities challenge the very notion of sustainable development, they aren’t the only risks, and they should be considered alongside a host of others borne entirely by community stakeholders affected by internationally financed projects.

This is the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective. From a purely risk-based lens, it is also useful to know whether projects under a climate portfolio are vehemently opposed by the local communities who are their end stakeholders, or have serious human-rights implications. That way, investors can consider factors that threaten the financial sustainability of a project.

As the urgency of the moment compels investors to move either aggressively into green-infrastructure development or passively into carbon offsets, accountability for climate finance is imperative. Investments should be underpinned with formal accountability mechanisms that allow communities to offer feedback on human-rights performance and ESG factors and provide a means of redress. To be equitable and effective, our green transition must be informed and led by those with the most at stake.

Gregory Berry

*Accountability Counsel

*Washington

Appeared in the October 5, 2023, print edition as 'Global Climate Policy Must Go Local, Too'.

an 6 23

in an extraordinary move, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito last week made an effort to preempt a then-forthcoming ProPublica investigation that shed light on a trip the conservative judge took with a Republican donor who later had cases before the court.

For University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman and New York University School of Law professor Melissa Murray,Alito’s op-ed, which appeared in the “ideologically friendly” Wall Street Journal,was “just the latest example of Alito’s insistence on enjoying the country’s respect even when he fails to act respectably.”

The pair shared their opinion on Alito’s prebuttal in an article published Sunday by the Los Angeles Times.

Alito’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, described by Litman and Murray as “indignant” and “bizarre,” included a reference to “two charges” levied against the justice, as well as a blanket declaration that “neither charge is valid” — though, as Litman and Murray write, Alito himself “does not dispute that he flew on a private jet and enjoyed a luxury fishing vacation in Alaska free of charge.”

Instead of replying to a list of questions ProPublica journalists sent to Supreme Court spokesperson Patricia McCabe, Alito “opted to bitterly and preemptively complain about the story in an ideologically friendly outlet,” Litman and Murray write.

“Alito appears aggrieved that the public has the audacity to criticize him,” the pair noted, adding that the justice’s “reaction is entirely consistent with the worldview he has revealed within and beyond his jurisprudence time and time again.”

“Because even though Samuel Alito is a Supreme Court justice with lifetime tenure and all the power that position entails, he still wants more,” Litman and Murray wrote.

Arguing that Alito seems “to believe that he and the court are so thoroughly supreme that they must be free of even a whiff of public criticism,” the law professors slammed him for “[demanding] perpetual public and professional affirmation — a safe space, if you will, where he is protected from micro-aggressions, bathed in praise and consistently depicted as reasonable and judicious regardless of whether he actually is.”

"And when his reception falls short of that, he lashes out at his critics no matter who they are,” the law professors added.

“The man who represents an institution charged with interpreting the 1st Amendment can’t bear others exercising their free speech rights to criticize him,” Litman and Murray declared. “Instead, he uses his stature and appearances to take potshots at those bold enough to question an institution that, as we keep learning, is loath to observe rules or restrictions”

Turning their attention to the “conservative legal movement” as a whole, Litman and Murray bemoaned Alito as “a prominent face of that project, who insists on the prerogatives of an emperor-king, among them unstinting general adulation and complete insulation from critique.”

“It’s no wonder the court’s public standing is in trouble,” the law professors added. “Some of the justices seem to be letting the term ‘supreme’ go to their heads.”

Read the full op-ed at the Los Angeles Times.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Fox’s Special Report covered this rigged “study” as if it were straight news

The study was touted on Monday’s edition of Fox’s flagship “straight” news program, Special Report with Bret Baier. A chyron on screen claimed, “Red states fare better on economic and health outcomes.” But as a close examination of the study reveals — briefly alluded to by Fox News correspondent Jonathan Serrie — this conclusion exists only after the authors made some creative adjustments “for age, obesity, and diabetes.”

Video Citation From the April 11, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier

Thestudy was also promoted in stories on Fox’s website, as well as in the editorial pages of the network’s corporate cousins: the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. FoxNews.com and the New York Post both mentioned the metric of “age-adjusted death rates,” while the Journal was a bit more forthcoming in noting that the study also made adjustments for “the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths).”

The reports in these three Murdoch publications all pointed to the report’s praise of Florida as supposedly one of the best-performing states — a possible sign of Bhattacharya’s influence on both Florida’s policies and this report’s verdict. By contrast, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has run through numbers from health care analyst Charles Gaba, which found that Florida is actually one of the worst-performing states in COVID-19 death statistics, even accounting for the state’s older population.

Moore also appeared on Monday morning’s edition of Fox Business’ *Varney & Co.*, during which he claimed, “The big takeaway is that the lockdown strategy was pretty much a total failure. … States that remained open did not have higher death rates from the virus than states that completely shut down.” Serrie later mentioned Moore’s study again, on Tuesday morning’s edition of :{America’s Newsroom:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Moore has built a career as possibly the worst economist in the media, making serially wrong pronouncements and false calculations in service of his political agendas.In March 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Moore to the Federal Reserve Board, only for Moore to eventually withdraw from consideration due to multiple controversies over his past political comments.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity rewrites death numbers in red states with a fake statistic: “Metabolic-health adjustment”

In order to arrive at the favored conclusion, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity report actually looked at more than just health outcomes. The group’s press release explains that it used three metrics for its findings — COVID-19 deaths, economic performance, and school openings — and declared they were “equally weighted” in the analysis. The result is that the question of saving lives accounts for only one-third of the calculation. The study also essentially just rehashes in pseudo-scientific form Moore’s long-standing contention that saving lives in the pandemic might not be “worth trillions of dollars of losses” and that simply allowing the virus to spread was “a better strategy” than enduring the economic costs of lockdowns.

The concept of age-adjusted deaths across populations is a tricky issue. While it is a legitimate line of inquiry, Fox News has exploited it ever since the start of the pandemic to create a nonchalant response to COVID-19 deaths among the elderly. Looking at this metric from a neutral source does show some interesting effects, but the ranks of worst-performing states would still be Republican-led ones such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Moore and his compatriots at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have gone even further, however,by setting up a new metric in the fine print of their supposed study. They call it an adjustment for “metabolic health” in different populations — “the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes.” But what it really amounts to is a manipulation of the statistics to declare that higher death tolls should be discounted in populations that were less healthy to begin with, and toact as if public health responses can be separated from the overall health of the public.

Much of the discourse around the role of obesity in COVID-19 deaths has framed it as “another ongoing pandemic,” and the role of diabetes has been addressed in media as a “public health train wreck” and evidence of “America’s diabetes crisis.” But the Committee to Unleash Prosperity instead treats these deaths as somehow a mitigating factor in the public health responses of the states most affected. It’s almost as if, by the standards of Moore and his co-authors, the deaths of unhealthy people are not a problem at all.

As a result of this statistical chicanery, death rates in the South and some other Republican-led states were magically revised downward, while deaths were “adjusted” drastically higher in many Democratic states — skewing the data to make blue states look like the worst offenders.

“NV, NY, NJ, and DC were the four states with the highest metabolic-adjusted mortality, even though none is in the top four without the adjustment,” the report says — as if that were a good thing for the authors’ credibility — because those four places all have obesity and diabetes rates that are below the national average. By contrast, in the real-world statistics they began with, the worst contenders were all red states.

Fox News has waged a two-year propaganda campaign against public health, in which it has lied about COVID-19 vaccines, promoted fake cures, encouraged the spread of the virus, and turned people defying public health measures into culture war heroes even as their actions have gotten them killed. Fox also clearly does not believe any of what it preaches — see its own corporate vaccination and testing policies — but the network nevertheless pursues this framing because it is “great for ratings.”

Who knows, perhaps the network will be able to come up with a study showing that watching Fox News is good for surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, once the analysts can adjust for the comorbidities associated with watching Fox News.

===

an 7 22

Donald Trump has lost the confidence of both of the major newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Under the headline, "The President Who Stood Still on Jan. 6,"The Wall Street Journaleditorial board harshly criticized the former president.

"No matter your views of the Jan. 6 special committee, the facts it is laying out in hearings are sobering. The most horrifying to date came Thursday in a hearing on President Trump’s conduct as the riot raged and he sat watching TV, posting inflammatory tweets and refusing to send help," the editorial board wrote.

"The committee’s critics are right that it lacks political balance," the newspaper wrote. "Still, the brute facts remain: Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call Mr. Pence to check on the safety of his loyal VP. Instead he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out."

The editorial concluded, "Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his."

Trump was also criticized by the NY Post editorial board under the headline, "Trump's silence on Jan. 6 is damning."

"As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling on his vice president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing. For three hours, seven minutes," the editorial board wrote.

"There has been much debate over whether Trump’s rally speech on Jan. 6, 2021, constituted “incitement.” That’s somewhat of a red herring. What matters more — and has become crystal clear in recent days — is that Trump didn’t lift a finger to stop the violence that followed," the NY Post wrote. "And he was the only person who could stop what was happening. He was the only one the crowd was listening to. It was incitement by silence."

The tabloid concluded he is unfit for office.

"His only focus was to find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power.

There is no other explanation, just as there is no defense, for his refusal to stop the violence," the newspaper wrote. "It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime. But as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again."

===

london protests 7 22 break glass in emergency so they did

===

wow omg ingraham?

an 7 22

**with thousands dying from extreme global heat in recent days, and as President Joe Biden**announced new executive actions to address the climate crisis, right-wing media figures and climate deniers are downplaying the heat wave and the threat from human-caused climate change.

In Europe, extreme “red” heat warnings were issued in the United Kingdom for the first time, and Wales recorded its highest-ever temperature. Railroad lines, major highways, and airport runways in the U.K. buckled under the extreme heat. Multiple regions of Germany also set all-time highs, as did at least part of Denmark. Over 2,000people have died in Spain and Portugal due to the extreme heat, which has fueled wildfires there and in parts of France. These record-setting events are not contained to Europe. Parts of the U.S. and Central Asia are suffering from extreme heat as well.

Even though the extreme heat event in Europe is truly exceptional, and its connections to the climate crisis are unquestionable, multiple right-wing media figures used the extreme heat event to downplay and criticize any possible action to address the climate crisis.

Right-wing media also attacked Biden for considering declaring a climate emergency during this deadly heat wave. Instead Biden unveiled much more modest steps to address climate impacts, such as putting $2.3 billion toward community resilience and infrastructure and bolstering offshore wind development. The Federalist falsely declared that “Biden has no right to declare a ‘national climate emergency,’' though The Washington Post explained that such a move would “tap a variety of long-standing emergency authorities under the National Emergencies Act and other laws.” LifeSiteNews fearmongered thatthe emergency powers would result in “climate lockdowns.” And other right-wing media suggested that there is no crisis at all.

Right-wing media denied the existence of the climate emergency

Fox News host Dan Bongino questioned whether the planet is getting warmer and whether humanity played a role in it, asking: “What kind of a dunce believes that? Come on. Is it [the planet] getting warmer? The answer is maybe. … The question isn’t is it getting warmer; the question is what’s human beings' role in it.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/19/22]

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton wrote on Twitter: “There is obviously no ‘climate emergency'.” Twitter, [7/19/22]

Fox host Tucker Carlson devoted a monologue to undermining the existence of climate change, reducing climate predictions to: “It’s gonna be hot and then it’s gonna rain hard.” “No one really believes in global warming,” he continued, “and that’s why all of the liberals in the United States live on the coasts – because they don’t believe it… The entire theory is absurd and they know it. … The whole thing is a joke.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [7/20/22]

On Fox, conservative British political commentator Douglas Murray dismissed the urgency of the climate crisis, saying, “Whenever there is not an absolutely vital recent emergency, we can always fall back on – oh and the climate emergency.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [7/20/22]

Fox anchor Dana Perino asked: “What has changed with the science that would lead a president to need to declare an emergency?” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*[, 7/20/22]

Fox host Todd Piro said that climate impacts, particularly the ones affecting the most vulnerable communities, did not meet his criteria for an emergency: “While we all love clean air and clean water — I, in fact, use both … this is not an emergency that we need to focus on today. We got a lot of other problems in the world.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/20/22]

Fox host Sean Hannity responded to new actions by the Biden administration to address climate change by dismissing the role of human influence over global warming saying, “I think these might be acts of nature, and God, and way out of the realm of something that human beings can prevent.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/20/22]

Conservatives also downplayed the deadly extreme heat

Climate change denying author Bjorn Lomborg dismissed the dangerous extreme heat event, writing on Twitter: “Standard climate scare.” Twitter, [7/17/22]

Climate denier Steven Milloy on Twitter dismissed a Washington Post article linking the Europe heat wave to climate change, writing: “Hot in some places. Cool in others. Just weather. Not climate.” Twitter, [7/19/22]

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the dangers extreme heat poses to human health, saying: “Don’t panic. It is summer. If it was December and this was happening, then I would say, this is a little weird. But it's just a little bit hotter than usual.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [7/20/22]

Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said on his radio show that the heat wave and wildfires were being reported so fervently because “you always know that it’s the slow season newswise when you start getting weather reports from Europe. … The thing that they will never tell you, the media, is that more people die of cold every year than die of heat every year, but the cold narrative doesn’t tend to play into the climate change narrative that they wish to progmulate.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*,[7/19/22]

Fox host Jesse Watters dismissed the extreme heat event as regular seasonal weather, saying: “Joe Biden has seen more seasons than a lot of us. He knows that it gets cold in January and hot in July.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22

Watters followed this up with an interview during which an on-screen graphic read: “Dems worried about weather, not real problems.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22]

Fox host Greg Gutfeld said: “We are in a full-blown heat wave hysteria.” He said that while he does believe “it’s getting warmer,” climate advocates should “think about the opportunity cost of all the zealotry. You know? Panic didn’t work.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/20/22]

Right-wing media also attacked the Biden administration for considering a climate emergency declaration

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed on his Infowars show that a climate emergency would be orchestrated by a “scientific global dictatorship whose aim is 90% world depopulation,” and that it would lead to a “dystopia”: “You’re gonna live in a 200-square-foot coffin apartment, you’re gonna be given forced inoculations five, six times a year, you’re gonna be sterilized, you’re gonna be killed.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*,[7/20/22]

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called a possible emergency declaration “a serious abuse of power.” The Wall Street Journal, [7/19/22]

Kilmeade called Biden’s executive orders tone-deaf and “agenda-driven,” insisting that they “will do nothing but hurt the price of oil and gas.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*,[7/19/22]

Hannity quoted climate denier Joe Bastardi, saying on his radio show that Democrats’ response to climate change is the “systemic dismantling of the American way of life. It’s not a rational response to a climate crisis.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [7/19/22]

Hosts of Fox’s Outnumbered claimed a possible climate emergency declaration from Biden “could cause a global depression,” is “suicide,” and is “going to kill the economy.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/19/22]

related: Tucker Carlson tells idiotic lie that “no one really believes in global warming”

07/20/22

Fox contributor calls for more coal plants as a solution to extreme heat

07/20/22

National TV networks mention climate change in 32% of segments on global extreme heat

07/19/22

===

it's a non-denial denial!

https://www.mediamatters.org/wall-street-journal/wall-street-journal-issues-non-apology-denying-10-year-olds-rape

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an 7 22

Indiana's Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita told Fox News anchor Jesse Watters on Wednesday evening that he intends to open a criminal investigation into the provider who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio that had to travel to The Hoosier State to obtain the procedure.

The girl was 45 days along and unable to terminate the forced pregnancy because The Buckeye State banned most abortions past six weeks – with no exceptions for rape or incest – immediately following the United States Supreme Court's right-wing majority decision retracting the constitutional right to abortion in its reversal of Roe versus Wade on June 24th.

Indiana allows abortions up until the 13th week as long as mandated conditions are met. Its rules are likely to tighten, however, when state lawmakers convene in an emergency session on July 25th to discuss post-*Roe*policy plans.

In Ohio, the restrictions are predicated on what legislators and anti-choice activists claim is the detection of a heartbeat. But that contention is not supported by empirical medical data.As an April 17th NBC News report noted, embryos have no structured heart at six weeks. Instead, there is "a tube that generates sporadic electrical impulses that eventually coordinate into rhythmic pulses."

Live Science also explained in detail last September that "after the detection of the flutter at six weeks, the heart muscle continues to develop over the next four to six weeks, undergoing the folding and bending that needs to happen for the heart to take its final shape."

On Tuesday, a 27-year-old suspect was taken into custody and confessed to twice assaulting the child. The arrest occurred while numerous Ohio Republicans – including Governor Mike DeWine, Attorney General Dave Yost, and Congressman Jim Jordan – were publicly suggesting that the story was a fabrication. The Wall Street JournalEditorial Board called the account "a fanciful tale." None of them have issued a formal apology in light of the accused rapist's capture.

Incidentally, Yost had expressed his doubts on Monday's Jesse Watters Primetime.During Wednesday's broadcast, Rokita blamed President Joe Biden's immigration policies for the crime despite the alleged perpetrator having lived in Columbus, Ohio for seven years.

"I shouldn't be here. I mean, first of all, this is an illegal immigration issue because likely of Biden's lawlessness at the border and everything going on down there. That's why Indiana as a non-border state has actually filed several independent lawsuits on that," Rokita said.

While justice for the victim may be served in an Ohio courtroom, Rokita is taking a much different approach in neighboring Indiana.

"Then we have the rape, and then we have this abortion activist acting as a doctor with a history of failing to report," he continued as Fox displayed a picture of the doctor who aided the underaged victim. "So we're gathering the information, we're gathering the evidence as we speak, and we're gonna fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure. If she failed to report in Indiana, it's a crime to not report, to intentionally not report."

Next, Rokita fired off several conspiracy theories.

**"This is a horrible, horrible scene caused by Marxists and socialists and those in the White House who want lawlessness at the border. And then this girl was politicized – politicized – for the gain of killing more babies, alright? That was the goal,**" Rokita declared. "And this abortion **activist**is out there front and center. The**lame stream media – the fake news** – is right behind it and unfortunately in Indiana, the**paper of record is fake news** and they were right there jumping in on all this thinking that it was gonna be great for their abortionist movement when this girl has been so brutalized."

Watch below or at this link.

====

2 22

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) vowed to continue the House select committee's investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The Wyoming Republican :{published a defiant op-ed in the}::{ **Wall Street Journal**}: standing up to threats and attacks from Donald Trump and his allies and calling out fellow Republicans who enable their efforts to undermine the rule of law.

"Republicans used to advocate fidelity to the rule of law and the plain text of the Constitution," Cheney wrote. "In 2020, Mr. Trump convinced many to abandon those principles. He falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him because of widespread fraud. While some degree of fraud occurs in every election, there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have changed this one."

The committee has found no evidence to back Trump's fraud claims, and she said the former president knows he's lying.

"Almost all members of Congress know this — although many lack the courage to say it out loud," Cheney wrote. "Mr. Trump knew it too, from his own campaign officials, from his own appointees at the Justice Department, and from the dozens of lawsuits he lost. Yet, Mr. Trump ignored the rulings of the courts and launched a massive campaign to mislead the public."

The committee will hold hearings later this year to show the lies that provoked the violent insurrection, Cheney said, and she warned that other Trump allies will pay the price, as Rudy Giuliani has by losing his law license, for helping spread falsehoods.

"Those who do not wish the truth of Jan. 6 to come out have predictably resorted to attacking the process — claiming it is tainted and political," Cheney said. "Our hearings will show this charge to be wrong. We are focused on facts, not rhetoric, and we will present those facts without exaggeration, no matter what criticism we face."

an 222

Using former vice president Mike Pence's speech last week, where he broke with Donald Trump on his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, as a springboard, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal ripped into the former president and called on the Republican Party to regain its moorings.

The board praised Pence for making a big step forward and urged the GOP to move away from Trump because the United States needs a "sane" Republican Party.

"The United States desperately needs a Republican Party that is a sane alternative to the ruling Democrats who have lurched to the coercive left. On that score, Americans should welcome Mike Pence’s stand Friday for constitutional principle on elections no matter its political cost," they wrote before turning their ire on Trump for his unconstitutional attempt at throwing out the presidential election results.

"Mr. Pence stands out as a rare Republican these days willing to stand up to Mr. Trump’s disgraceful behavior after the election. Too many in the GOP seem to have lost their constitutional moorings in thrall to one man," they wrote. "The conventional wisdom now is that Mr. Trump controls the Republican Party and can have the 2024 nomination if he wants it. But someone should remind voters that Mr. Trump ended as a three-time election loser. He mobilized Democrats against him in historic numbers to cost the GOP the House in 2018, then the White House in 2020, and finally the two Georgia Senate seats in 2021."

After praising Pence for standing on principle, the editors noted that they had predicted that the former president was his own worst enemy who eventually got what he deserved.

"We wrote often during his Presidency that Democrats couldn’t defeat Donald Trump, but Mr. Trump could defeat himself. He did, and his post-election behavior compounded the harm to his party," they accused. "Republicans who want to repeat the experience may find the electoral result is the same—and this time without the fortunate presence of Mike Pence."

You can read the whole piece here -- subscription required. cause you know, capitalism

===

mma 10 21

Wall Street Journal’s bogus justification — and terrible precedent — to publish Trump’s Big Lie letter

10/29/21

===

heroic ayn rand moral high ground?!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/litigation-without-end-chevron-battles-on-in-28-year-old-ecuador-lawsuit-11619975500

many pix]

chevron Corp. was fixated on roses.

The giant U.S. oil company objected last June when Washington proposed allowing duty-free rose imports from the world’s poorest countries, including Ecuador.

A decade earlier, an Ecuadorean court had blamed Chevron for oil pollution and told it to pay $9.5 billion in damages, one of the largest-ever penalties of its kind.

Chevron had since proved the verdict fraudulent, it told the U.S. Trade Representative. But Ecuador refused to render it unenforceable despite an order to do that from an international arbitration tribunal. Letting Ecuador save money on flowers after blatant “acts of defiance” would tell the world the U.S. rewards bad behavior, the oil company said.

Chevron lost the war of the roses. But it still hasn’t paid a cent of the Ecuadorean judgment, and says it won’t stop legally battling until it can ensure that it never has to.

“We’re going to fight this until hell freezes over, and then we’ll fight it on the ice,” a former Chevron general counsel, Charles James, said before his retirement in 2010, a remark that became a watchword at the company.

His successor, R. Hewitt Pate, said this spring that “only the government of Ecuador could deliver a final resolution of this case,” by nullifying the verdict.

Big companies that see lawsuits against them as unfounded often reach a point, after losing a court ruling or two, when settling seems the sensible course. Chevron never did. Twenty-eight years after the Ecuador case was filed, 10 years after it came to a verdict and seven years after Chevron got a different court to find egregious misbehavior by a plaintiffs’ lawyer, Chevron fights on—pressing to make sure that lawyer doesn’t profit from the case, hiring attorneys in countries where it operates and where plaintiffs might try to collect, trying to force Ecuador to pay its legal costs and, as with the roses, asking the U.S. government to penalize Ecuador in the trade arena.

Chevron’s opponents also refuse to back down, making the case what appears to be the oil industry’s longest-running legal slugfest. Aspects of it have been heard by some 100 judges in 36 courts in seven countries. By Chevron’s estimate, it has cost the company nearly $1 billion, including 1.5 million hours of its staff, advisers’ and attorneys’ time. Executives and lawyers who worked on the case have retired or died since it began.

Although the oil industry’s era of global power seems to have peaked, for Chevron part of that era—costly, intractable environmental-pollution litigation—continues unabated. The Ecuador legal fight has lasted even longer than the one that followed the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Well before Chevron lost the damage verdict in 2011, it set out to turn the tables on the litigants. It subpoenaed or sued dozens of people who had helped the plaintiffs’ side, legal records show, and unearthed damaging video clips about the plaintiffs’ legal team’s activities from documentary-film outtakes. Chevron’s lawyers obtained the personal notes of the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer, Steven Donziger, and used his own words against him....The company scored a seminal victory in 2014 when a federal judge in New York found that Mr. Donziger and others on his team had offered a bribe to a judge in Ecuador and had ghost-written the court verdict.

Mr. Donziger’s New York law license was revoked. He faces a criminal contempt-of-court trial this month over his refusal to turn over records to Chevron as ordered. His bank accounts were frozen. He has been under house arrest for nearly two years, unable to leave his Manhattan apartment without court permission, an ankle bracelet tracking his every move.

In December, Mr. Donziger shouted out his window to supporters gathered below to mark his 500th day of detention. “What is happening to me is a sign of our success,” he said, using a bullhorn: “This is a corporate playbook that is designed really by Chevron and the entire fossil-fuel industry to silence advocacy.” Below his window hung a sign saying “SOS Free Steven!”

The company’s strategy “is to pulverize me personally, to criminalize me,” Mr. Donziger said in an interview. “This idea they’ve won and I’ve lost is their view, not my view.”

Chevron is asking the tribunal that ordered Ecuador to void the verdict—a panel of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague—to also order nearly $800 million of Chevron’s legal costs to be paid by Ecuador, a country whose gross domestic product is about half of Chevron’s stock-market value.

Íñigo Salvador Crespo, an Ecuador justice official whose agency represents the country in the dispute, declined to comment, saying to do so could compromise its legal strategy. A newly elected president of Ecuador who hasn’t yet taken office, Guillermo Lasso, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the dispute.

Chevron officials say they have punched back so hard, for so long, because they found fraud in the litigation and because Ecuador in the 1990s granted a release from liability after a cleanup.

“This was never for Chevron one of these things where we added up potential liability and said we have to fight this because the number is too much,” Mr. James, the former general counsel, said in an interview. To some longtime observers of the case, it looks more like a grudge match with Mr. Donziger, who has refused to concede anything despite a series of court losses. “They’re making an example of him,” said Ted Folkman, an attorney who has closely followed the legal battle. As the years go on, he said, “it’s not being done for reasons that look rational.” ...Chevron’s Mr. Pate said the company has no choice but to continue defending itself because the “perpetrators of the fraud” refuse to acknowledge court and arbitration findings.

Chevron’s defense and Mr. Donziger’s personal case have overshadowed the original plaintiffs, natives of the forested northeast of Ecuador, who say their drinking water and quality of life remain damaged by oil drilling.

“Chevron wants to talk about the injustices they have suffered. Steven wants to talk about the injustice he is suffering. Who is talking about the people on the ground and how they’ve been affected?” said Judith Kimerling, a professor of environmental law and policy at the City University of New York’s Queens College, whose research in Ecuador inspired the original lawsuit.

Chevron inherited the already eight-year-old dispute in 2001 when it acquired Texaco Inc., which operated in Ecuador from the 1960s to 1990 in partnership with government-run Petroecuador. They drilled in an area of the Amazon occupied only by native people and migrant farmers, and gave it the name Lago Agrio.

Texaco spent $40 million on local cleanup and obtained a liability release from Ecuador’s government in the 1990s. Chevron says that means any remaining pollution is the responsibility of its state-owned former partner.

A group of Amazonians sued Texaco in 1993 in federal court in New York, saying they were sickened by water and air polluted from the oil operations. Texaco said the suit belonged in Ecuador, a judge agreed, and a new suit was filed there in 2003. This suit took advantage of a newly passed Ecuadorean law that allowed individuals to sue not only for harm to themselves but also for damage to the environment.

Mr. Donziger, a former public defender fluent in Spanish, joined the plaintiffs’ team early on and became the face of the case in Ecuador, with a strategy that relied heavily on swaying public opinion. He rallied activists in front of the Lago Agrio courthouse. A documentary film crew followed him as he barged into judges’ offices to make demands.

Mr. Donziger spoke to Huaorani women in October 2003 during the trial of the suit filed by Ecuadorean indigenous people who said oil drilling poisoned their homeland.

The plaintiffs’ side brought journalists to villages where residents lived alongside drilling waste in unlined pits. Chevron put on counter-tours to sites reflecting Texaco’s cleanup.

Around 2009, Chevron adopted a strategy of trying to show that plaintiffs’ lawyers were acting improperly. It hired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, a law firm that had helped Dole Food Co. defeat litigation by Nicaraguan banana farmers who claimed to be left sterile by Dole pesticides; Gibson Dunn convinced a U.S. judge lawyers had recruited plaintiffs who weren’t sterile or didn’t even work on a Dole banana property.

For Chevron, a Gibson Dunn team led by Randy Mastro, once a top aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was New York City mayor, probed every aspect of the plaintiffs’ case. Using an obscure court process called Section 1782, which allows parties to seek evidence in the U.S. to help with foreign lawsuits, Gibson Dunn gained access to troves of internal documents from people who had worked with the plaintiffs.

It also amassed evidence that Mr. Donziger and his team had pressured Ecuadorean judges to rule in their favor and secretly wrote the bulk of the report of a court-appointed outside expert who said Chevron should pay $27.3 billion.Chevron secured the outtakes of a documentary film on the case and turned up clips such as one where Mr. Donziger recounted a favorite quote to colleagues: “Facts do not exist. Facts are created.”

Mr. Donziger said the plaintiffs’ activities followed Ecuadorean court customs.

In a conference room in lower Manhattan in 2010, Gibson Dunn pitched federal prosecutors on the idea of criminally prosecuting Mr. Donziger. They declined, figuring this was a squabble between a corporation and well-funded adversaries that wasn’t worth their limited resources, said a person familiar with the meeting.

Chevron then civilly sued Mr. Donziger and his team under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a federal law often used against mobsters. It filed the RICO suit on Feb. 1, 2011.

Two weeks later, a judge in Ecuador handed down the verdict against Chevron, then doubled the damages to $19 billion after Chevron refused an order to apologize. It was later& ... reduced back to $9.5 billion but otherwise upheld by the Ecuadorean courts ...With Chevron refusing to pay, and having no assets in Ecuador, the plaintiffs tried unsuccessfully to collect in places where the oil company operated, such as Argentina, Brazil and Canada. Chevron hired lawyers around the world to resist such efforts.... Its strategy was vindicated in March 2014 when, after a civil trial in New York, a federal judge issued a 485-page opinion ...https://www.wsj.com/articles/chevron-wins-civil-suit-fighting-9-5-billion-judgment-1393949848?...concluding that Mr. Donziger and his team had submitted false evidence in Ecuador, paid off a court-appointed expert and ghost-written much of his opinion, and promised $500,000 to an Ecuadorean judge to rule in their favor. Even if they sought to help native people, Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote, “they were not entitled to corrupt the process to achieve their goal.”< https://www.wsj.com/articles/chevron-wins-ruling-blocking-enforcement-of-9-5-billion-ecuador-judgment-1470686218...“I believe it is invalid, though I recognize courts have found otherwise,” he said.The ruling came with ramifications: Mr. Donziger couldn’t try to enforce the Ecuadorean judgment in the U.S. and he couldn’t profit from it; he had to relinquish his 6.3% interest in any payout.

Chevron lawyers filed motions every time they thought Mr. Donziger might be violating the judge’s orders. An example was when he asked a hedge-fund firm to finance efforts to collect the damages in return for a share of them.

A portfolio manager at Elliott Management Corp. said Mr. Donziger told him the plaintiffs had raised $33 million, and 15% to 20% of the damage award was committed to investors and others. Elliott turned him down, the portfolio manager said in a sworn affidavit. A spokesman for Elliott declined to comment.

Chevron also told the court Mr. Donziger had hired an executive coach and agreed to pay him 0.007% of whatever was collected from Chevron, out of Mr. Donziger’s share. Chevron said that violated the ban on his profiting from the verdict.

He argued it didn’t, but in May 2019, Judge Kaplan found Mr. Donziger in civil contempt of court. The judge said he violated orders by not turning over all of his electronic devices and email accounts for imaging, for failing to relinquish his stake in the damage award and for his deal with the executive coach.

Two months later, Judge Kaplan ordered a trial to determine whether Mr. Donziger should be held in criminal contempt of court for continuing to ignore the orders.

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, to which the judge referred the criminal matter, declined to pursue it. In an unusual procedure, Judge Kaplan then appointed a private lawyer to serve as prosecutor and assigned another U.S. district judge, Loretta Preska, to handle the case, which is set for trial starting May 10. It was Judge Preska who put Mr. Donziger under house arrest, deeming him a flight risk.

A state appellate court had already suspended Mr. Donziger’s law license. He requested a public hearing on that. There, 15 witnesses testified about the honest human-rights lawyer they said they knew, among them Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a co-founder of Greenpeace and an indigenous Ecuadorean leader. Chevron sent a team to observe[pix]

A New York judicial official found Mr. Donziger posed no threat to the public and recommended letting him keep his license. Describing him as “often his own worst enemy,” the official said: “The extent of his pursuit by Chevron is so extravagant, and at this point so unnecessary and punitive.”

The opinion wasn’t binding. New York state’s appellate court said the official was too dismissive of the severity of the misconduct, and it disbarred Mr. Donziger last August. He is seeking an appeal of the decision.

For years, Chevron separately pursued an international arbitration case. It argued that Ecuador’s government had violated an investment treaty with the U.S., both by not upholding the liability release granted in the 1990s and later by allowing a fraudulent court verdict to stand.

In 2018 the international arbitration panel sided with Chevron. It ordered Ecuador to wipe out all consequences of the court verdict and preclude anyone from enforcing it, on grounds it was obtained fraudulently.

Though Ecuador hasn’t done this, Chevron officials point to instances where, they say, its representatives have admitted the verdict was fraudulent.

In one, Ecuador’s ambassador told the U.S. Trade Representative in a letter last July that Ecuador had been in touch with authorities in countries where plaintiffs sought to enforce what she called “the fraudulent Lago Agrio judgment.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

The letter from the ambassador, Ivonne Baki, added that Ecuador didn’t know what steps it could take to satisfy the arbitration order, saying its laws and international law constrained it from intervening in the court system. Efforts to reach Ms. Baki for comment were unsuccessful.

At a virtual shareholders’ meeting in May 2020, the actor Alec Baldwin told the CEO Chevron was using shareholders’ money to personally attack Mr. Donziger. Mr. Wirth called Mr. Baldwin’s summary of the case false and offensive, saying: “Mr. Donziger is an adjudicated racketeer.”Investors in Chevron appear to have largely ignored the judgment’s potential financial impact. But its chief executive, Michael Wirth, continues to face questions about the case.

There have been no settlement discussions since 2012. At a meeting that year, held while the damage award was temporarily doubled to $19 billion, Mr. Pate walked out after the plaintiffs’ side proposed a nearly $10 billion settlement, according to Mr. Donziger. Chevron didn’t dispute that account.

Said Dylan Mefford, a California attorney who worked on the case as a Gibson Dunn associate: “Both sides genuinely felt the others were criminals.”

—Ryan Dube and Silvina Frydlewsky contributed to this article.

Write to Sara Randazzo at sara.randazzo@wsj.com

Appeared in the May 3, 2021, print edition as 'Lawsuit Without End: 28 Years S

===

rudy pal masrtro

aoc etc ltr but no action by AG garland

https://kpfa.org/episode/a-rude-awakening-june-4-2021/

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/republican-election-fraud/

Hours after President Biden declared that "democracy has prevailed" during his inaugural address, longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove urged Republicans to pressure GOP election officials and legislators to create "a model election code" to reconsider the laws surrounding 2020's two voting options that lead to the presidential election's record turnout.

"Republicans should also encourage GOP secretaries of state and state lawmakers to develop a model election code," Rove wrote in a January 20 commentary for the Wall Street Journal entitled, "The Republican Future Starts Now."

"The job of proposing electoral reforms shouldn't be based on the unsupported claims of widespread fraud peddled by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell," Rove continued. "Instead, the goal should be to suggest measures that restore public confidence in our democracy. How do states with extensive mail-in and early voting like Florida and Texas get it right?"

Rove's commentary comes as Republican-majority legislatures in battleground states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona have proposed bills or convened hearings to review the laws that allowed people to vote with mailed-out ballots or early in-person in 2020.

"Whenever Karl Rove writes a piece in the Wall Street Journal, the history of it suggests that Democrats should pay careful attention," said David Daley, author of *Unrigged: How Americans are Battling Back to Save Democracy*. "Because the Wall Street Journal is where Republicans can signal to their donor class their key projects."

In March 2010, Rove penned a Wall Street Journal commentary openly discussing the GOP's REDMAP project,which targeted 107 state legislative seats that "would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats." REDMAP succeeded, creating GOP majority legislatures and congressional delegations in the otherwise purple states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Alabama.

The website of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafts model bills for social conservatives and economic libertarians, did not yet promote election reforms on its website. However, it linked to theConservative Action project,which posted a defense of the GOP lawmakers who opposed certifying the Electoral College slates from Arizona and Pennsylvania. The expanded use of voting via mailed-out ballots and early voting must be examined, it said.

"The 2020 election was conducted in an unprecedented manner: largely by mail, and in a way that overwhelmed the capacities of many states. It is not at all unreasonable to review the manner in which votes were counted," said the Conservative Action Project memo, which was signed by more than 100 activists and organizations. "Indeed, if the goal is to restore faith in future elections, then a comprehensive review and analysis to determine what went wrong, what went right, and what is in need of reform should be a critical next step."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/wsj/

alexh

Following the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building, many of President Donald Trump's apologists and sycophants are being slammed as "enablers" who helped pave the way for the violence of January 6. The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial board, however, rises to the defense of Trump's allies in an editorial published on January 18 — two days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden — and the piece is receiving a great deal of negative reactions from Trump's critics.

"As the Trump presidency ends in the disgrace of the Capitol riot, an effort is already underway to erase everything in the last four years as disgraceful too," the WSJ's editorial board argues. "That's a lie — a big lie, to borrow the cliché of the moment. Donald Trump's profound character flaws need to be separated from what so many people in his administration accomplished for the country." twt]

the WSJ's editorial board goes on to praise Trump allies ranging from former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to members of his economic team, including Larry Kudlow. The piece credits Trump's team with creating a "pre-COVID U.S. economy" that was the "strongest since the 1990s."

"A presidency is more than one man, as we will soon learn the hard way as progressives populate the Biden Administration," the WSJ's editorial board writes. "The Trump Administration should be remembered for far more than its terrible final days."

Here are some of the negative reactions to the editorial that have been posted on Twitter:

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/wall-street-journal-trump/

op ed fails

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/pence-mulvaney/

,... June, Mike Pence, supposed chief of the coronavirus White House task force put pen to paper to assure Americans that the so-called second wave of COVID-19 cases was all just a fictional media narrative. "In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a "second wave" of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown," Pence wrote in the lede of the piece.

Beyond spouting a bunch of platitudes about Trump's amazing leadership, Pence said the country was "winning the fight," cases had "stabilized," and new outbreaks were being contained through early detection and increased testing. Trump had "rallied the American people to embrace social-distancing guidelines" and, because people had done so, "all 50 states have begun to reopen in a safe and responsible manner," Pence wrote.

"The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different," he added, concluding, "We've slowed the spread, we've cared for the most vulnerable, we've saved lives, and we've created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That's a cause for celebration, not the media's fear mongering."

When Pence wrote that op-ed in mid-June, the U.S. has just passed 115,000 COVID-related deathsand was averaging some 750 deaths per day over a 5-day period. At the time of this writing (Dec. 20), the U.S. had surpassed 317,000 deaths due to COVID-19 and the country recorded a record 3,600 earlier in the week. Heckuva job, Mikey. And thanks for Wall Street Journal for lending your pages to the guy who had already botched the coronavirus response from Day 1.

And then there was White House whatever-thingamajig Mick Mulvaney telling all the pearl clutchers in early November that Donald Trump would " concede gracefully" if he lost. Who coulda guessed that the guy who told everyone to just "get over it" after Trump tried to trade foreign aid to Ukraine for a fabricated investigation of his political rival would be so wildly off about Trump's "graceful" exit.

Mulvaney asserted that the misguided questions about Trump's commitment to a peaceful transition of power came from people who "still think he should've been impeached, believe the polls, and consider the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN reliable sources." Totally, Mick—fake news!

Here's the reality about a month out from Trump's constitutionally ordained exit:...

===

apparently they draw the line at putin disinfo?

an 1020

...[reporter] jenkins explained that the news organization had been provided documents by Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden's former business partner.

"You're talking about a business venture with the Chinese energy company in 2017 at a time when Joe Biden was not vice president," Jenkins explained. "But Fox's review of Bobulinski's documents, which were given to us, found no role for Joe Biden in that business venture."

"There's another former business partner who says he knows of no involvement by Joe Biden," Fox News host Howard Kurtz added."The Wall Street Journalsays it also reviewed the text messages and emails, saying, they don't show either Hunter Biden or James Biden — the brother — discussing a role for Joe Biden."

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-expected-splashy-wall-street-journal-coverage-of-hunter-bidens-emails-he-was-disappointed/

===

heated 320

it took Maine Governor Janet Mills 12 days since the first case of novel coronavirus hit to implement the type of restrictive social distancing policies scientists overwhelmingly recommend to halt disease spread, including the closure of nonessential businesses.

It took her only five days, however, to delay the state’s ban on single-use plastic bags, using a scientifically questionable theory that reusable bags pose an outsized risk of spreading COVID-19.

Since Mills’ March 17 order, reusable grocery bags in Maine have become taboo. City officials are now discouraging shopping from bringing them to the store, claiming they will threaten grocery story workers. “According to current research and understanding, COVID-19 can survive on various surfaces for hours and in some cases days,” Portland City Manager Jon Jennings said in a news release last week.

And though Mills was the first state governor in America to give credence to this theory, she hasn’t been the last. Over the weekend, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu outright prohibited shoppers from bringing reusable bags to stores. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker did the same on Wednesday. “From now on, reusable bags are prohibited and all regulations on plastic bag bans are lifted,” he said.

This, however, is likely just the beginning of the plastic industry’s war on reusable bags. Because as the pandemic has picked up steam in America, so too has the industry’s push for policy and culture shifts to encourage single-use plastics, and ban reusable alternatives. Their allies in the news media, oil and gas industry, and conservative think tank world are all quickly lining up behind them—and together, they’re putting pressure on the public and the federal government get on board.

Last week, the Plastics Industry Association asked the Department of Health and Human Services to make a national pronouncement supporting single-use plastics and advocating against reusable grocery bags, claiming they will worsen the pandemic. “Study after study after study have shown that reusable bags can carry viruses and bacteria, spread them throughout a grocery store, and live on surfaces for up to three days,” they claimed.

But those three studies don’t actually say what the industry claims. Taken together, they do not provide sufficient evidence that reusable grocery bags pose a greater threat to consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic than single-use plastic grocery bags.

Let’s go through them one by one.

1) The 10-year-old American Chemistry Council-funded study that looked at 84 reusable bags in two states and found no disease-causing bacteria

The first piece of research that the plastic industry says strongly suggests a correlation between reusable grocery bags and coronavirus spread was this 2010 study funded by the American Chemistry Council, an industry group which represents plastics interests. Conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona, it was published in the journal Food Protection Trends in 2011.

Analyzing just 84 reusable bags collected in California and Arizona, the studies authors concluded that “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half.” They did not, however, find any pathogenic bacteria or strains of E. Colithat actually make you sick. As Consumer Reports noted at the time, “They only found bacteria that don’t normally cause disease, but do cause disease in people with weakened immune systems.”

“A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study,” Michael Hansen, a senior staff scientist at Consumers Union, said in the article. “These bacteria can be found lots of places, so no need to go overboard.”

The reason there was bacteria on the bags was because people didn’t wash them. If people washed the bags, the study said, 99.9 percent of all bacteria was destroyed.

2) The study that looked at 30 reusable bags and said essentially the same thing

The second study, published in the international journalFood Controlin 2019, found microbes capable of causing food-borne illness on the bags. This time, half the bags tested had coliform bacteria on them and some even had E. coli.

This makes sense, again, because the bags had a bunch of food in them, and were not washed or sanitized. As Johns Hopkins University infectious disease specialist told Bustle at the time, “Reusable shopping bags, like anything, can accumulate micoorganisms from the environment. Unless the bag is visibly soiled, most of the risk is not worth worrying about.”

Of course, this means coronavirus could be on your bag, because coronavirus can live on plastic surfaces for up to 3 days. But neither of these studies indicate that it has any greater risk of being on your reusable bag than, say, your money, your phone, or your hands, which also get a lot of use at the grocery story. Nor do they indicate that reusable bags made of plastic have a greater risk of holding the virus than single-use plastic bags, which could be infected with pathogens during transportation, manufacturing, or handling.

Cameron Wolfe, an associate professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Duke University, told the Wall Street Journal something similar, when talking about how companies like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts have stopped filling customers’ reusable cups out of fear of coronavirus. “It’s drawing a pretty long bow to believe this will be meaningfully impactful,” he said. “It’s an incredibly low likelihood that the cup would be the primary vehicle for transmission to occur.”

The article added: “Coronavirus can survive for a period outside the body and is transmitted through droplets like those generated by a cough or a sneeze. If a cup is infected, its owner probably is too, said Mr. Wolfe, making handing over cash and touching door handles potentially just as risky.

“You’d have a better impact if you told customers with active coughs not to come in, or to use hand sanitizer before approaching the coffee stand,” he said.”

3) The study that looked at one reusable bag that someone had literally vomited next to in a bathroom and then gave to a group of children.

Yeah, honestly, like I can’t even go there with this one. You can read about that study here.

Also, coronavirus is not a norovirus. It is literally not the same thing.

---

No evidence, no problem

There is certainly a chance that coronavirus could live on our reusable grocery bags if those bags come in contact with an infected person—particularly if those bags are made of plastic. A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the novel coronavirus ismoststable on plastic surfaces.

But that also includes single-use plastic surfaces, said Aaron Bernstein, the director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment. “This suggests that relying on plastic bags may be the best way to ensure the virus persists in the environment and facilitates spread of the disease.”

Clearly, there is still a debate to be had over the efficacy of plastic bag policies for coronavirus—especially since plastic bag bans in themselves are attempts to address climate change and ocean pollution, two other pressing global crises. It would be foolish to prematurely stop an attempt to address two global crises without a baseline sort of consensus that it would even remotely help the other.

The right and its allies, however, appear to have made up their minds.Energy in Depth, a pro-oil-and-gas drilling industry front group formed by the American Petroleum Institute, wrote an article claiming coronavirus will spread without more single-use plastic bags. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journalhave written editorials in support of reversing bag bans. Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative anti-climate group, is taking out ads on Facebook claiming that plastic bag bans help spread the coronavirus infectio.

[graf twt]

it makes sense why so many right-leaning interest groups would come together on this issue. Before coronavirus, single-use plastic products were falling out of favor, as studies showed they were exacerbating climate change and destroying the ocean. Now, the industry is hoping COVID-19 will make everyone forget all that.

“As the coronavirus spreads across the country, single-use plastics will only become more vital,” Plastics Industry Association President Tony Radoszewski said in a statement last week. “We live longer, healthier, and better because of single-use plastics.”

Bernstein, however, is hoping that we remember something else. “In a crisis, we need science to guide us,” he said. “And that means science done by credible investigators who are supported by organizations without a vested financial interest in a specific outcome of their research.”

...

Wall Street Journal published an editorial on April 23 that derided electric vehicles in Germany as "dirty," based on a recent study that has been called into question by a number of experts and mainstream German news outlets. The Journal's editorial board, which has a history of climate denial, has attacked both German energy policy and electric vehicles (EVs) before.

The dubious study has also been hyped by climate deniers and right-wing outlets in the U.S., including Infowars and The Daily Caller.

:{...

came out against trump on putin bromance after press conf, traitor

===

moderation la fest book on invest report, actually has some agw, but all about cost of stuff fish, beer etc

https://www.wsj.com/news/author/robert%20lee-hotz

but

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-government-report-warns-of-economic-losses-from-climate-change-1543009853

... human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen,’ report says

By Robert Lee Hotz

Nov. 23, 2018 4:50 p.m. ET

The impact of global climate change is being felt across the country and, unchecked, could cause U.S. economic losses totaling hundreds of billions of dollars a year by the end of the century, says a new U.S. government report released Friday.

Many U.S. communities and companies are trying to counteract the effects of rising temperatures ranging from water shortages or flooding to worsening wildfires and air pollution. But those measures so far fall short, according to the latest installment of the U.S. National Climate Assessment.

...

===

https://theconversation.com/why-a-minor-change-to-how-epa-makes-rules-could-radically-reduce-environmental-protection-98042

Why a minor change to how EPA makes rules could radically reduce environmental protection

Since the Reagan administration, federal agencies have been required to produce cost-benefit analyses of their major regulations. These assessments are designed to ensure that regulators are pursuing actions that make society better off.

[Executive Order 12291--Federal regulation

Source: The provisions of Executive Order 12291 of Feb. 17, 1981, appear at 46 FR 13193, 3 CFR, 1981 Comp., p. 127, unless otherwise noted.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, and in order to reduce the burdens of existing and future regulations, increase agency accountability for regulatory actions, provide for presidential oversight of the regulatory process, minimize duplication and conflict of regulations, and insure well-reasoned regulations, it is hereby ordered as follows:]

In my experience working on the White House economic team in the Clinton and Obama administrations, I found cost-benefit analysis provides a solid foundation for understanding the impacts of regulatory proposals. It also generates thoughtful discussion of ways to design rules to maximize net benefits to the public.

On June 7, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt proposed changing the agency’s approach to this process in ways that sound sensible, but in fact are a radical departure from how government agencies have operated for decades.

As the agency frames it, the goal is to provide “clarity and real-world accuracy with respect to the impact of the Agency’s decisions on the economy and the regulated community.” But I see Pruitt’s proposals as an opaque effort to undermine cost-benefit analysis of environmental rules, and thus to justify rolling back regulations.

:{https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-administrator-pruitt-proposes-cost-benefit-analysis-reform:(style="white-space:pre-wrap"):}::{ }::{[}: Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) to announce that the Agency is soliciting public input on whether and how to change the way it considers costs and benefits in making regulatory decisions.

"Many have complained that the previous administration inflated the benefits and underestimated the costs of its regulations through questionable cost-benefit analysis," said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. "This action is the next step toward providing clarity and real-world accuracy with respect to the impact of the Agency's decisions on the economy and the regulated community."

Multiple EPA-related statutes refer to the calculation of costs and benefits, but implementation has been inconsistent. As a result, EPA has created a risk of uncertainty and confusion for states, local communities, and industry. EPA is now considering ways to codify common-sense, best practices for cost-benefit analysis in rulemaking.

Through the ANPRM, EPA will seek comments and input for the Agency to consider in developing any subsequent proposed rule. EPA will take comments on the ANPRM for 30 days after publication in the Federal Register.

Background:

Under the leadership of President Trump, EPA has taken steps to improve EPA’s cost-benefit calculations. Consistent with the President’s Executive Order 13783, EPA updated the social cost of carbon to reflect prior and best practices. While the Obama EPA estimated the social cost of carbon to be an average of $36 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, this EPA calculated an average of $5 per ton.

EPA has also proposed a different approach to analyzing co-benefits – benefits from reduced emissions of a pollutant that is not the actual target pollutant of a regulation. Particulate matter was the co-benefit most cited by the Obama EPA. In fact, particulate matter co-benefits accounted for more than 80% of the purported benefits of all of Obama’s air rules. The Clean Power Plan (CPP), a rule aimed at carbon dioxide reductions, derived most of its benefits from a reduction in particulate matter. When EPA issued its proposed repeal of CPP, it provided a transparent account of the impact of the rule on the “targeted pollutant” – carbon dioxide.

Earlier this morning, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial on Administrator Pruitt's efforts to "stop the EPA's numerical shenanigans" and reform cost-benefit analysis at the Agency

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cost-benefit-reform-at-the-epa-1528326402 no name

:{ :(style="white-space:pre-wrap"):}::{]}:

A Deceptive New Report on Climate - WSJ - Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deceptive-new-report-on-climate-1509660882

Steven E. Koonin. Nov. 2, 2017 6:14 p.m. ET. 801 COMMENTS. The world's response to climate changing under natural and human influences is best founded ...

Opinion Journal: How Government Twists ... - Wall Street Journal

:{▶ 3:41:(style="border-top-left-radius:2px;bottom:0px;font-weight:bold;padding:1px 3px;position:absolute;right:0px;text-align:right;background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7)"):}:

www.wsj.com/.../80027CBC-2C36-4930-AB0B-9C3344B6E199.htm...

Apr 21, 2017

Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on how bureaucrats spin scientific data. Photo ...

A 'Red Team' Exercise Would Strengthen Climate ... - Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/.../a-red-team-exercise-would-strengthen-climate-science-1492728...

Apr 20, 2017 - Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on scientific ... Mr. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, is director of the Center for Urban ...

Good Science Should Rule U.S. Climate Policy - WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/articles/good-science-should-rule-u-s-climate-policy-1510084635

Nov 7, 2017 - It's unfortunate that Steven E. Koonin chose to wait until months after an extensive public review process to critique the Climate Science Special ...

Opinion Journal: The Climate Change Debates ... - Wall Street Journal

www.wsj.com/.../64410386-C38D-4902-A53A-1E73B0468D4C.htm...

Apr 21, 2017

Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on scientific self-censorship. Photo: istock images.

Climate Science Is Not Settled - WSJ - Wall Street Journal

www.wsj.com/articles/climate-science-is-not-settled-1411143565

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Steven:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: E. :{Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. Sept. 19, 2014 12:19 p.m. ET. 2921 COMMENTS. The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Steven E. Koonin - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Koonin

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Steven:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: E. :{Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (born December 12, 1951) is a theoretical physicist and Director of the Center ... In "Climate Science Is Not Settled," a 2014 essay published in the :{Wall Street Journal:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, :{Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: wrote that "We are very far from the knowledge ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Faculty News | Steven Koonin | The Wall Street Journal - NYU Stern

www.stern.nyu.edu › Experience Stern › News & Events

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Apr 21, 2017 - Professor :{Steven Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: discusses how bureaucrats spin scientific data ... Excerpt from The :{Wall Street Journal:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: -- "What you saw coming out of ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

E.P.A. to Give Dissenters a Voice on Climate, No Matter the ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/climate/scott-pruitt-climate-change-red-team.html

Jun 30, 2017 - In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in April, Steven Koonin, a physicist at New York University, proposed that a “red team” of dissenting ...

EPA: Here's the Obama energy guy that Pruitt might hire -- Monday ...

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060058443

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:{Aug 7, 2017 - In the fall of 2014, :{Steven Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: was finishing up an op-ed for The :{Wall Street Journal:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. The theme was a contentious one, especially for a ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

https://www.alternet.org/wall-street-journal-upset-about-having-interact-poor-people-airport

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/wall-street-journal-editorial-board-sticks-giant-fork-steve-bannon

===

https://www.alternet.org/media/wall-street-journal-echoing-trumps-derangement-and-its-own-reporters-are-appalled

During the 2016 election, the conservative Wall Street Journal declined to endorse Donald Trump, recognizing the Republican candidate's manifest personal deficiencies posed a clear and present danger to American democracy. While the newspaper has grown more Trump-curious since he was sworn into office, it has largely resisted the overt #MAGA cheerleading of Rupert Murdoch's other media organs, Fox News and the New York Post.

At least until last week. Despite multiple indictments being handed down in the Russia probe, and a separate Trump aide pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, the paper's once tepid support for the president has reached a fever pitch bordering on dissociation.

On October 25, the Journal incurred the wrath of readers and social media alike when it ran an editorial titled "Democrats, Russian and the FBI," arguing that special investigator Robert Mueller “lacked the critical distance to conduct a credible probe," and that he should resign his post for the good of the country.

Four days later, in "Begging Your Pardon, Mr. President," David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey called on Trump to issue blanket pardons to every administration official ensnared in the investigation—himself included.

The day after that, an editorial titled "The Manafort Indictment" acknowledged the malfeasance of Trump's former campaign manager, but managed to single out the Democratic Party for its financing of the Fusion GPS dossier (opposition research compiled, incidentally, by former members of the Wall Street Journal).

These rantings and ravings have not been lost on the paper's reporters. According to a recent report by Vanity Fair, staffers fear the opinion page has begun to undermine the publication's credibility. The Journal has always been a purveyor of neoconservative dogma, particularly as it pertains to the economy and foreign policy, but as one veteran editor recently confided, “It does feel like this is a different level of crazy."

“We could disprove half the stuff [the opinion writers] are saying if they just read our own reporting," a WSJ reporter told Vanity Fair. "It’s like living in some alternate universe."

Another staffer likened the paper's editorials on the Mueller investigation to the dark days of Vince Foster, a former Clinton confidante whose suicide in 1993 continues to fuel conservative conspiracy theories. (The right has since added John F. Kennedy, Jr. and the DNC's Seth Rich to Hillary's ever-expanding hit list.)

Former Wall Street Journal editor Bill Grueskin put things more succinctly in a recent tweet:[img]

Twitter Ads info and privacyThis is not the first time the Journal has embarrassed itself or its reporters. In August, editor-in-chief Gerard Baker reprimanded the paper's staff for its entirely accurate coverage of a Trump rally in Phoenix, where the president painted himself as the true victim of the terrorist attack in Charlottesville. “Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” he wrote in an email. “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?”

That same month, Politico released a full transcript of his interview with the president in late July, exposing Baker's chummy personal relationship with the Trump family. At one point during the conversation, he even tells Ivanka, "It was nice to see you out in Southampton a couple weeks ago."

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the opinion page began parroting the talking points of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Over the past 18 months, conservative publications ranging from the Weekly Standard to the National Review have, at various junctures, embraced the Republican standard-bearer, even after the latter outlet ran an entire issue "Against Trump." But as the august Wall Street Journal's descent into authoritarianism and deranged conspiracy theory reveals, no corner of right-wing media is immune from the disease of Trumpism.

===

https://www.alternet.org/media/wall-street-journal-echoing-trumps-derangement-and-its-own-reporters-are-appalled

===

coal booster 817

https://www.ecowatch.com/mountaintop-removal-share-international-2480303664.html

Coal and the Curse of Commercialization

By Cher Gilmore

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial crowed "Coal Makes a Comeback," touting the 14.5 percent increase in weekly coal production nationwide in 2017 compared to 2016 and the 58 percent increase in exports during the first quarter alone. That newspaper views the economic growth in coal-producing states like West Virginia, New Mexico and Kentucky stimulated by the current administration's policies as something to celebrate, and the editors conclude that "there's still demand for U.S. coal if regulators allow energy markets to work."

While the increase in coal production and use may be good news for coal companies and the states to which they pay taxes, economic growth is not the only thing to consider when weighing the costs and benefits of an activity. What about the beautiful Appalachian mountain landscapes completely destroyed by "mountaintop removal" and the streams and aquifers filled with toxic mining waste? What about the "black lung" disease suffered by too many miners, and the deaths from collapsed mines? And, perhaps most significantly, what about the fact that coal-burning plants are some of the biggest emitters of the greenhouse gases causing global warming and wreaking havoc on the planet?

These effects of coal production—the ones that affect the daily lives of actual people—are not even considered in the calculation. Why would that be? British author Benjamin Creme said it's because we don't understand the larger purpose of life. "We have replaced our reverence for life with commercialization, a market forces economy and the worship of money. The economy is the new religion of the world, and it is this commercialization that is driving us to the very edge of destruction."

In a world of commercialization, everything becomes a commodity with a price tag. Individuals are seen only as consumers, and those with the biggest bank accounts are able to buy whatever they want. Those who have little get little, and what they do get—including basic necessities like food and water—is often second rate or worse. Corporate and financial interests rank above the needs of human beings and the health of the planet, and unhappy people are either lulled into apathy by 24-hour digital entertainment, or turn to drugs and alcohol to escape from their narrow, unsatisfying lives.

In thrall to market forces, governments compete fiercely with one another, sacrificing the livelihood and well-being of their peoples. The major industrialized countries, making up only a third of the world's population, dominate the global economy and impose their chosen structure—commercialization or "competition" biased in their favor—on the other two-thirds. "This," said Creme, "is economic totalitarianism and must come to an end. It is based on the lie that we all start equal; we do not."

Creme has been the major spokesperson for decades regarding information about the World Teacher for this age: Maitreya. According to Creme, Maitreya is expected to appear at the invitation of the world's media on an international television broadcast when the conditions are right—most likely following the predicted world financial collapse, which will awaken humanity to reality for the first time and open us to hearing Maitreya's advice.

During that broadcast, Maitreya will analyze our present problems and show clearly the consequences of various actions we might take. These revelations will ultimately bring us to an inevitable choice: to continue in our destructive business as usual mode and extinguish all life, or to follow his suggestions for a simpler, saner way of living that will guarantee a happier future for all people.

Maitreya will teach, most basically, the need to share the natural resources of the world, which belong to everyone equally and should not be greedily usurped by the wealthy few. Since this is antithetical to the direction the developed world in particular is moving, in order for Maitreya's central principles—justice, freedom and sharing, for all people on Earth—to be put into practice, the existing social/economic structure will have to be dissolved. The financial collapse will have that effect. In its aftermath, we will begin to know ourselves as brothers and sisters, and with Maitreya's help will come to see that the only way forward is together, in cooperation, for the common good.

When we have come to our senses, we will not choose to "grow our economy" regardless of the burdens it places on ordinary people and the planet. Nor will we choose to promote the burning of coal—which is only today's example of commercialization gone amok—or any other action whose end result is planetary destruction. Benjamin Creme's spiritual Master assures us, "From the ruins of the old, a new civilization will be built by human hands under the inspiration of Maitreya ... Humanity will overcome this time of crisis and enter into a new and better relationship with itself, its planet and its source."

http://www.ecowatch.com/new-york-times-hires-climate-denier-2379607444.html

New York Times Defends Hiring Climate Science Denier

By Graham Readfearn

The New York Times has been defending the paper's hiring of a climate science denier, fighting off its critics with what it claims is a standard fashioned from hardened "intellectual honesty."

The controversial hire in question is that of Bret Stephens, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, who has joined the New York Times as a columnist and deputy editorial page editor.

While at the Wall Street Journal, Stephens consistently undermined and disparaged climate change, one time describing it as an "imaginary enemy" and another comparing it to religion with a "doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen."

Stephens' new boss, editorial page editor James Bennett, told the paper's public editor Liz Spayd: "The crux of the question is whether his work belongs inside our boundaries for intelligent debate and I have no doubt that it does. I have no doubt he crosses our bar for intellectual honesty and fairness."

Suffice to say, there are plenty who disagree. One climate scientist has already canceled his subscription in protest, with others watching closely.

No doubt that Stephens can write—he won a Pulitzer in 2012 for lots of opinions on stuff other than climate.

But like other conservative columnists admired for their poetic prose and strident opinions while attacking climate change, the methods used by Stephens might be compared to those of a fake chef producing a lumpy and unsatisfying word soup.

Crap Soup

There's no real care with the preparation and no quality control over the freshness or blending of the ingredients, but these indiscretions are suitably masked with enough flavor-enhancers to give some short-term satisfaction to unsuspecting diners/readers.

But the New York Times should probably be serving up something far more substantial than crap soup and three-day-old bread to its massive audience.

Let's take, for example, a November 2015 column which Stephens wrote in the build up to the United Nations climate negotiations in Paris.

Stephens wrote that a trend in rising global temperatures was "imperceptible" and that the "hysteria" around climate change ignored how this trend could be "a product of natural variation."

There is a mountain of evidence that global warming is not caused by "natural fluctuations" and this evidence has been in existence for decades. To suggest that it isn't, would be to fall below any bar of intellectual honesty erected in the newsroom of the New York Times or in any science academy around the globe.

In the same column, Stephens chose to highlight "the hyping of flimsy studies—melting Himalayan glaciers; vanishing polar ice" that he said were being used to push a political viewpoint.

Stephens was referring to an error on Himalayan glaciers buried away in a UN report, while choosing to ignore the decades-long trend of melting that has been recorded at glaciers all over the planet.

Climate Agnostic?

Stephens himself has told Huffington Post that he's an "agnostic" on climate change and said while it "seems" the weight of scientific evidence points to human causes for global warming, that evidence might be wrong because "the history of science is replete with consensus positions that have evolved."

Now, the New York Times' own defense of its hiring of Stephens is almost as redundant as the arguments that Stephens borrows from climate science deniers.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the New York Time's Bennett said there was "more than one kind of denial."

"And to pretend like the views of a thinker like Bret and the millions of people who agree with him on a range of issues, should simply be ignored, that they're outside the bounds of reasonable debate, is a really dangerous form of delusion," he said.

Let's think about what the New York Times opinion page might look like if we based it on the beliefs of millions of Americans.

According to Gallup polling data, some 20 percent of Americans believe in witches, which is roughly half the number of people who think extrasensory perception is actually a thing.

A poll conducted by Harris in 2016 found that two out of five Americans think ghosts are real. Belief in evolution? That's at 49 percent. Creationism? Some 37 percent are down with that.

Lizard people controlling societies? One in 25 Americans fear their presence, but where's their representation in the New York Times editorials?

Arguing that someone should be hired to the editorial desk of one of the world's most influential newspapers because "millions of people" hold a particular belief is a clear path to supporting the sort of delusional thinking that has more Americans believing in the paranormal than accepting that climate change is mostly human-caused.

That 1970s Cooling Myth

Opinions are worth printing when they're based on the preponderance of credible evidence, not the self-interests of fossil fuel–funded "fellows" at so-called think tanks or the whimsy of attention-seeking contrarians.

In an August 2011 interview on Fox News Business, Stephens told viewers "in the 1970s we were supposed to believe in global cooling."

Were we? Well, if you want to base your intellectually robust opinion on a moldy-old myth based on a couple of 1970s news items, then fine.

Alternatively, read a 2008 review of science papers published between 1965 and 1979 finding that only seven papers were predicting cooling against 44 saying temperatures would rise.

Also in that interview, Stephens lauded an essay by the late author Michael Crichton that attacked the consensus on global warming.

In that essay, based on a lecture, Crichton said: "Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."

So let's just stop a second and think about what Crichton was advocating here.

The consensus of medical science says smoking will massively increase your risk of getting cancer and heart disease, even if you can't say exactly which cigarette killed your wheezy relative. You're being had, folks.

Crichton was putting up a straw man argument—that science is done by consensus—in order to then attack it.

Climate Consensus

When people talk about a consensus on the causes of climate change, they're describing the collective findings of thousands of peer-reviewed articles published in leading scientific journals over decades using multiple methods from a diverse set of observations.

The consensus that climate change is caused by humans comes from the long-studied physical properties of greenhouse gases to the measurements of warming oceans, the atmosphere and the places on the planet where there is or was, ice.

Don't get me wrong here, folks. You're free to choose a glib sound bite from a science fiction writer based on a misrepresentation of the concept of scientific consensus.

But take care not to be had by charlatans promising to chat to your very dead Aunty Betty or save your soul from the claws of the lizard people.

I think it might be time someone broke into the editorial office of the New York Times and raised that bar of intellectual honesty.

Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.

===

odd timing on eve of gorsuch and ac vote?

trump fail flynn wsj

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/15021220/wall-street-journal-editorial-trump

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a scathing criticism of President Trump, warning that “if he doesn't show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he's a fake President.” It also colorfully says that “the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle.”

The week started on a bad note for Trump, with FBI Director James Comey debunking his wiretapping claims in a hearing on Monday. On that topic, the editorial, titled “A President’s Credibility,” accused Trump of “rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims.” In the piece, which unabashedly skewers Trump, the editorial board made a point of defending White House press secretary Sean Spicer, writing that he “doesn’t deserve this treatment.”

Trump has spent much of the week stumping on behalf of the Republican health care plan,which has been criticized by members of his own party and, it’s worth noting, by typically pro-Trump media outlets such as Breitbart as well.

The editorial also goes in on Trump’s attempts to sell unconvinced House Republicans on the bill:

All of this continues the pattern from the campaign that Mr. Trump is his own worst political enemy. He survived his many false claims as a candidate because his core supporters treated it as mere hyperbole and his opponent was untrustworthy Hillary Clinton. But now he’s President, and he needs support beyond the Breitbart cheering section that will excuse anything. As he is learning with the health-care bill, Mr. Trump needs partners in his own party to pass his agenda. He also needs friends abroad who are willing to trust him when he asks for support, not least in a crisis.

That Trump seems to have lost the editorial board of the Journal shows just how poor a job he’s doing. Since his election, the paper’s opinion pages had been moving in a more pro-Trump direction. In February, an op-ed editor critical of the president was reportedly dismissed. The same month, Politico’s Joe Pompeo reported that there was ongoing tension at the Journal regarding how the paper should treat Trump.

Wednesday’s op-ed is notable for its explosive language — but also for its break from the direction the Wall Street Journal seemed to be heading in. If the editorial board thinks it can impact the president’s behavior by calling him out, though, it’s likely to be disappointed.

Legendary CBS newsman Dan Rather lit into the Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief for saying he was reluctant to call out obvious lies by Donald Trump by saying one had to consider the president-elect’s “moral intent.”

On Sunday’s Meet The Press, WSJ’s Gerard Baker was asked about Trump’s penchant to blurt or tweet things off the top of his head that have no basis in reality. According to the Baker, calling those things a “lie” would be going too far.

“I’d be careful about using the word, ‘lie.’” Baker said. “‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead…I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied, I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective.”

On Facebook, Rather blasted Baker by opening with “A lie, is a lie, is a lie.”

“Journalism, as I was taught it, is a process of getting as close to some valid version of the truth as is humanly possible. And one of my definitions of news is information that the powerful don’t want you to know,” Rather wrote. He continued:

“It is not the proper role of journalists to meet lies—especially from someone of Mr. Trump’s stature and power—by hiding behind semantics and euphemisms. Our role is to call it as we see it, based on solid reporting. When something is, in fact, a demonstrable lie, it is our responsibility to say so,” he continued. “As I have said before and will say as long as people are willing to listen, this is a gut check moment for the press. We are being confronted by versions of what are claimed to be ‘the truth’ that resemble something spewed out by a fertilizer-spreader in a wind tunnel. And there is every indication that this will only continue in the Tweets and statements of the man who will now hold forth from behind the Great Seal of the President of the United States.”

Rather concluded by warning news consumers, “You as the paying, subscribing public, can use your leverage and pocketbooks to keep those who should be honest brokers of information, well, honest."

http://www.alternet.org/media/defining-lie-post-truth-america-wsj-editor-brilliantly-explains-mainstream-medias-reluctance

Much like the New York Times and the Washington Post, President-elect Donald Trump targeted the Wall Street Journal on the campaign trail.

"I'm not a believer of the Wall Street Journal, I think it's a piece of garbage, it's going to lose a fortune, don't work," Trump said on February 19, 2016 at a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

"Don't worry, it'll be out of business like all the rest of them very soon," Trump added.

Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker is used to Trump's attacks by now, or as he calls it, "strange, tough love."

"He'd attack our reporters individually, anything we'd done, anything he didn't like, and then at the same time you also know how much he actually reads the newspaper or watches TV," Baker told MSNBC's Chuck Todd about Trump. But Baker is still hesitant to call out Trump's lies. Here's why: “I’d be careful using the word ‘lie’,” Baker told Todd.

“Lie implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.”

Baker would prefer to investigate Trump's outlandish claims and gave the example of Trump's lie regarding "thousands" of American Muslims being seen celebrating 9/11. Otherwise, he feels the publication risks objectivity.

“I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied,” Baker said. “I think you run the risk that you look like you are — like you’re not being objective.”

Baker wants the reader to be trusted to make up his or her own mind while reading the Wall Street Journal and their writers' social media posts.

...

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/20/twofer-editorial-proves-wall-street-journal-denial-about-fracking-and-climate-change/214877

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) final report on the drinking water impacts of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) has provoked howls from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which blasted EPA analysts as “science deniers” pushing “fake news.” But the editorial’s deeply flawed reasoning is the latest evidence that the Journalis in denial when it comes to scientific findings that conflict with its pro-fossil fuel agenda, whether they relate to fracking or climate change.

In the December 18 editorial, the Journalmisrepresented the changes the EPAmade to its draft version of the report, which was released in June 2015:

After being barraged byplaintiff attorneys and Hollywood celebrities,the EPA in its final report substituted its determination of no “widespread, systemic impact” with the hypothetical that fracking “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances” and that “impacts can range in frequency and severity” depending on the circumstances.

[...]

The EPA now asserts that “significant data gaps and uncertainties” prevent it from “calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts.”

In reality, all of the findings the Journalpointed to in the final version of the report were also present in the draft version. The draft version stated that “there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources,” identified “factors affecting the frequency or severity” of those impacts, and acknowledged that "data limitations" prevent the agency from having "any certainty" of how often fracking has actually impacted drinking water.

The one change the Journalcorrectly identified was that in the final version of the report, the EPA rescinded its draft conclusion that there was no evidence fracking has “led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.” But contrary to the Journal’sclaim that the EPA disavowed that finding because the agency had been “barraged by plaintiff attorneys and Hollywood celebrities,” it was actually changed after theEPA’s scientific advisory board, which evaluates the agency’s “use of science,” pointed out that the draft conclusion wasn’t supported elsewhere in the report:

The [Science Advisory Board] has concerns regarding the clarity and adequacy of support for several major findings presented within the draft Assessment Report that seek to draw national-level conclusions regarding the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources.

[...]

Of particular concern in this regard is the high level conclusion statement on page ES-6 that “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” The SAB finds that the EPA did not support quantitatively its conclusion about lack of evidence for widespread, systemic impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources, and did not clearly describe the system(s) of interest (e.g., groundwater, surface water), the scale of impacts (i.e., local or regional), nor the definitions of “systemic” and “widespread.” The SAB observes that the statement has been interpreted by readers and members of the public in many different ways. The SAB concludes that if the EPA retains this conclusion, the EPA should provide quantitative analysis that supports its conclusion that hydraulic fracturing has not led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.

EPA Deputy Administrator Tom Burke recently confirmed that the EPA chose to remove the “no widespread, systematic impacts” language after receiving feedback from the science advisory board, and “Burke said the EPA opted to remove the phrase because it ‘could not be quantitatively supported’ and it ‘showed that sentence did not clearly communicate the findings of the report,’" as American Public Media reported.

The Journalfurther claimed that “the EPA’s faulty construction of a monitoring well caused contamination” in Pavillion, WY, citing that situation as an example of how “any technology has the potential to inflict some damage” if mismanaged. However, that claim – which has been pushed by a fossil fuel industry front group – has been debunked by experts at Stanford University, as the Casper Star-Tribunereported:

Industry critics once argued samples from the EPA’s groundwater monitoring wells should be discounted because of faulty construction. But the compounds found in those monitoring wells are more commonly associated with fracking—not the cements used to encase a well, [Stanford researchers Dominic DiGiulio and Robert Jackson] say.

The Journalconcluded its editorial by asserting that it is “ironic” that liberals who “denounce anyone who cites uncertainties about carbon’s climate impact as ‘deniers’” are now “justifying their opposition to fracking based on scientific uncertainties.” As quite possibly the most frequent purveyor of climate science misinformation in the entire media landscape, the Journalhas rightly received substantial criticism for its climate denial. The difference, of course, is that there is near-universal scientific consensus that carbon pollution is warming the planet, whereas both the draft and final versions of the EPA report show that no such consensus yet exists about the impacts fracking has had on drinking water resources.

Such false equivalency only goes to show that the Journal editorial board is in denial about both climate change and fracking.

===

Another study, cited by The Guardian [no link]Tuesday, concludes that the growth of conservative media has cemented this gap.

Conservative newspaper The Wall Street Journalwas found to publish inaccurate information on the topic, according to a report by Media Matters for America.

"Out of 93 climate-related opinion pieces published in the Journal during the time period examined, 31 featured climate science denial or other scientifically inaccurate claims about climate change (33 percent)," Media Matters for America said.

A 2013 study found that those Americans who consumed news from conservative news sources such as Fox had a higher distrust of science and scientists, than did those who read or watched non-conservative media.

Breaking through to those who fiercely deny the existence of climate change is no easy task, the Ohio State University researchers concluded.

ref

http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/09/01/study-newspaper-opinion-pages-feature-science-denial-and-other-climate-change-misinformation/212700

The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Washington Post all published climate science denial and other scientifically inaccurate statements about climate change on their opinion pages over the last year and a half, while The New York Times avoided doing so, according to a new Media Mattersanalysis of those four newspapers. The Journal published by far the most opinion pieces misrepresenting climate science, while all three instances of climate science denial in the Post came from columns written by George Will. The Journal and USA Today also published numerous climate-related op-eds without disclosing the authors’ fossil fuel ties, while USA Today, the Post, and particularly the Journal frequently published some of the least credible voices on climate and energy issues.

Three Major Newspapers Published Climate Science Denial On Opinion Pages, Led By The Wall Street Journal

Analysis: Three Major Newspapers’ Opinion Pages Published Climate Science Denial And Other Antiscience Claims. Media Matters examined op-eds, editorials, and columns in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post from January 1, 2015, to August 31, 2016, to determine how often climate science denial and other false statements about climate science appeared on each newspaper’s opinion pages. We found that the Journal, the Post, and USA Todayall published climate science misinformation on their opinion pages, while theTimesavoided doing so. Unlike the Journaleditorial board,which has denied climate science, the editorial boards of the Times, the Post, and USA Today all recognize the scientific consensus around man-made climate change. But our analysis found that theTimeswas the only one of these newspapers that did not publish an op-ed or column containing climate science denial during this time period. *Media Matters,* [Climate Denial/Misinformation Spreadsheet; The New York Times, 4/29/15; The Washington Post, 7/21/15; USA Today, 11/30/15]

...

Newspapers Gave Key Climate And Energy Misinformers Significant Exposure

WSJ, USA Today, And Wash. Post Frequently Published Least Credible Voices On Climate And Energy Issues. Our analysis found that a select group of writers were responsible for much of the climate- and energy-related misinformation in the four newspapers: Wall Street Journal editorial board members Holman Jenkins and Kimberly Strassel, Washington Post columnist George Will, a few high-profile congressmen, representatives of a few key fossil fuel front groups, and frequent op-ed contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley. Altogether, The Wall Street Journal published 55 climate- or energy-related opinion pieces by these misinformers since January 2015, while The Washington Post and USA Todayeach published nine, and The New York Times published just one. *Media Matters*, [Frequent Misinformers Spreadsheet]

Misinforming Columnists At WSJAnd Wash. Post

Holman Jenkins: 32 Columns. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Holman Jenkins Jr. frequently writes columns dismissing science, attacking climate policies, and defending the fossil fuel industry. During the time period examined, Jenkins authored 18 Journalcolumns that mentioned climate change -- 15 of which denied the consensus that human activities are driving climate change or otherwise misinformed on climate, such as questioning whether climate change is a “problem” or disputing the reliability of climate models to predict future warming. He also frequently attacked actions aimed at addressing climate change or holding the fossil fuel industry accountable, writing eight columns criticizing government investigations of Exxon, three criticizing the Paris climate agreement, and two criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. In one column responding to Climate Nexus’ study of climate denial on the Journal’s opinion pages, Jenkins declared, "No contributor has written more frequently on the subject of climate change on these pages,” and claimed that his views on the subject are “ploddingly conventional.” Yet he then proceeded to deny climate science by asserting that “science has been unable to discern signal from noise in the hunt for man-made warming.” As climate scientist Steve Sherwood pointed out to DeSmogBlog:

“That’s just not true. There are dozens and dozens of studies that have done exactly this. There’s a whole field of climate science looking at detection and attribution. For example, you can see the human fingerprint of greenhouse gas warming in precipitation extremes, in the vertical pattern of change between the stratosphere and troposphere. And all these studies use observations and models. If you are dismissing models, then that means the person does not understand the scientific process.” *Media Matters*, [Frequent Misinformers Spreadsheet, Climate Denial/Misinformation Spreadsheet; Climate Nexus analysis, accessed 9/1/16; Partnership for Responsible Growth, accessed 9/1/16; DeSmogBlog,7/1/16]

Kimberley Strassel: Six Columns. Journaleditorial board member Kimberley Strassel is also a climate science denier, as Mother Jones has documented, and her Journalcolumns frequently include climate-related misinformation. Strassel defended Exxon in a June 16 column that peddled the baseless conspiracy theory that the real target of the attorneys general investigations is “a broad array of conservative activist groups that are highly effective at mobilizing the grass-roots and countering liberal talking points.” In it, she falsely claimed that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has never “taken a position on climate,” when in fact ALEC has crafted model legislation that misrepresents science while attacking climate action. Strassel also claimed that the Koch brothers’ front group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has “never taken a dime from Exxon,” but the group’s predecessor organization received hundreds of thousands from Exxon, and it remains an open question whether Exxon is continuing to funnel money to AFP via dark money groups DonorsTrust and the Donors Capital Fund. In an April 14 column, she claimed that Democratic attorneys general are “pursuing the bogus claim” that Exxon “suppressed climate science,” when in fact they are investigating whether Exxon violated the law by misleading investors about climate change in order to achieve financial gain, regardless of whether Exxon published climate research in journals. And in an April 21 column, she called climate change “the left’s new religion.” *Media Matters*, [Frequent Misinformers Spreadsheet; 6/17/16, 7/8/16; Mother Jones,2/13/16]

...

Bjorn Lomborg: Eight Op-Eds. Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center -- which was launched in the U.S. with funding from the Koch-linked Randolph Foundation -- wrote six op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and two in USA Today about climate or energy. In them, Lomborg frequently distorted climate science or deceptively criticized climate action. For instance, in one Journal op-ed in which he suggested that fewer people will die as the planet warms, Lomborg “misrepresent[ed] the results of existing studies” and “rel[ied] on flawed reasoning,” according to climate scientists who analyzed his claims for Climate Feedback. He also cited the global warming “hiatus” to dismiss concerns about future climate change, and falsely claimed that spending resources on climate aid to poor countries will deprive those countries of "medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients." Additionally, he frequently cited a Copenhagen Consensus Center study to claim that the Paris climate agreement would reduce global warming by only 0.17 degrees Celsius. However, this study was debunked by multiple experts, and Lomborg’s findings were contradicted by several more reputable analyses, which found that the Paris climate agreement would limit global warming by approximately 1 degree Celsius and could lead to further global warming reduction. In USA Today, Lomborg again cited his study to call the Paris climate agreement a “hugely expensive way of doing very little.” He also twisted facts to claim that ceasing production of electric cars would keep people from dying. *Media Matters*, [Frequent Misinformers Spreadsheet; Climate Denial/Misinformation Spreadsheet, Fossil Fuel Disclosure Spreadsheet, 12/3/15,2/24/15 ; Climate Feedback, 4/6/16]

Matt Ridley: Two Op-Eds And One Essay. Matt Ridley frequently contributes to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages about climate change and sometimes discloses that his family leases land for coal mining in northern England. During the time period examined for this study, Ridley authored two climate-related Journal op-eds -- and one additional piece published for “The Saturday Essay” in the Journal’s Life section, where he asserted that fossil fuels “will save the world.” One Ridley op-ed co-authored with Benny Peiser, director of the U.K.-based climate denial organization Global Warming Policy Foundation, was titled “Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate” and released shortly before the international climate talks in Paris. Dozens of scientists criticized and debunked this op-ed on Climate Feedback, calling it a “very biased and misleading presentation of the science,” and adding that it contained “rampant cherry-picking, misleading statements, and flawed logic.” Climate Feedback assigned the op-ed an overall credibility score of “Low” to “Very Low.” A previous Media Matters analysis found that between January 2011 and October 15, 2012 -- when Ridley was a columnist for the Journal -- he authored 18 columns about climate change in which he frequently distorted climate science and compared climate scientists to eugenicists because eugenicists "insist[ed] that its tenets were beyond reasonable challenge." In one 2012 Journal column, Ridley asserted that global warming will be a “net good” for the planet. *Media Matters*, [Frequent Misinformers Spreadsheet, Climate Denial/Misinformation Spreadsheet, 10/29/12, 12/20/12; The Wall Street Journal, 3/13/15; Climate Feedback, 11/27/15]

http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/09/01/study-newspaper-opinion-pages-feature-science-denial-and-other-climate-change-misinformation/212700

their videos pop up, embedded on other sites

In a video interview posted on The Wall Street Journal’s website, Journal editorial board member Mary Kissel told viewers that if they are “confused about the science surrounding climate change,” they should “trust” Rod Nichols, chairman of a climate science-denying fossil fuel front group known as the CO2 Coalition. During the interview, Nichols denied that human activities such as burning oil and coal are responsible for recent global warming, claiming that “[c]limate change has been going on for hundreds of millions of years,” that “[t]here is not going to be any catastrophic climate change,” and that “CO2 will be good for the world.” Kissel asked Nichols, “why don't we hear more viewpoints like the ones that your coalition represents,” and concluded that the CO2 Coalition’s research papers are “terrific.”

Here's the August 17 video:

[img]

MARY KISSEL (Wall Street Journal editorial board member): Are you confused about the science surrounding climate change? Don't know who to trust? Well, we have help for you! Rod Nichols is chairman of the CO2 Coalition ... Rod, I want to start with the CO2 Coalition. What exactly is it, and who's involved?

RODNEY NICHOLS (CO2 Coalition chairman): We formed about a year ago -- a group of scientists, mostly physicists, a few chemists, engineers, economists -- who are convinced that the public is being misled about carbon dioxide. CO2. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is not a pollutant. But if you read the editorial pages and the news pages of most papers the word "pollutant" is always used with CO2.

KISSEL: So does that mean that your group doesn't believe in climate change? Or doesn't believe in something called "catastrophic climate change"?

NICHOLS: Climate change has been going on for hundreds of millions of years. Everybody should recognize that there is climate change. There is not going to be any catastrophic climate change. CO2 will be good for the world. CO2 enhances agriculture. Crops tend to grow on the average of 15 percent more per year given more CO2. And even more important, crops don't need as much water when they're growing if they have more CO2. You can see this at the edges of deserts where struggling little green plants -- you couldn't see them 35 years ago. Thirty-five years later the satellite photos clearly show that these little green plants -- with more CO2 and needing less water at the edge of deserts -- they're fluorishing!

KISSEL: So this is a completely opposite viewpoint than what is represented in, as you say, most of the media, most of our college classrooms. How did they get to this point, Rod? Why don't we hear more viewpoints like the ones that your coalition represents?

NICHOLS: Well, that's a really good question that I don't have a completely satisfactory answer to. I shy away from conspiracy theories, I don't think -- but it's true in the scientific literature, you can find "skeptics" as we are sometimes called who are arguing against what appears to be a consensus but their views are not covered. Their views are not debated. If nothing else, the CO2 Coalition wants to open up a real debate. Science thrives with discovery and debate. And the subtitle of our first report, about six months ago, was called "See For Yourself."

KISSEL: So where do viewers go to find out more information about what you're doing and to get educated on science about climate change?

NICHOLS: Good questions. CO2Coalition.org is a storehouse of very reliable data. We've surveyed data over decades published in our reports. One is called White Paper 1, and White Paper 2. You can get these, we'd be glad to send them to you.

KISSEL: And you don't need to be a scientist to understand these papers?

NICHOLS: They're prepared to be readable by any intelligent citizen. Even my daughter found them readable and she's not an environmentalist, she's not an alarmist, she's an art history major. She loved them.

KISSEL: Maybe even I will find it readable. In fact, it is readable. I have read these papers. They're terrific. CO2Coalition.org, go check it out, Rod Nichols is the chairman, thanks for joining us.

Previously:

Breitbart News: Go-To Outlet For "Academics-For-Hire" By The Fossil Fuel Industry?

Slate Destroys Climate Denier Myth That CO2 Is Not A Pollutant

*The Wall Street Journal*: Dismissing Environmental Threats Since 1976

~ CPP:

Free Beacon Writer Mocks Fact That Climate Change Increases Risk Of Asthma Attacks By Saying Everyone Who Breathes Is A "Child-Killer." Washington Free Beacon staff writer Lachlan Markay posted a series of tweets mocking and deriding the Clean Power Plan. He called "carbon pollution" an "Orwellian phrase" and mocked the fact that climate change increases the risk of asthma attacks by writing: "Every time you exhale you're giving a child asthma. I hope you're happy, child-killer":

"Carbon pollution" is right up there among the most Orwellian phrases of the Obama era.

-- Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) August 3, 2015

Every time you exhale you're giving a child asthma. I hope you're happy, child-killer. https://t.co/59YhrVNWRS

-- Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) August 3, 2015

[Twitter, 8/3/15; 8/3/15]

Free Beacon's Markay Compares Obama And EPA's McCarthy To Fictional Meth Dealers. In a tweet responding to a report that West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said "residents [are] turning to drugs because Obama is shutting down their coal plants," Markay compared Obama and McCarthy to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman -- fictional meth dealers from the TV show "Breaking Bad":

Barack Obama : Gina McCarthy :: Walter White : Jesse Pinkman https://t.co/B9lL0KSVhT

-- Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) August 3, 2015

[Twitter, 8/3/15]

The Wall Street Journal Characterized CPP As A Government Overthrow.The headline for a Wall Street Journal editorial described the CPP as a "Climate Change Putsch." The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "putsch" as "a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government." [The Wall Street Journal, 8/3/15; Merriam-Webster, accessed 8/3/15]

Tom Nelson: CPP Will Result In "0 Fewer Asthma Attacks & 0 Fewer Premature Deaths." Responding to a tweet by President Obama that said the CPP would lead to 90,000 fewer asthma attacks and prevent 3,600 premature deaths, blogger Tom Nelson tweeted: "This is ridiculous fraud. Real results of CO2-tweaking are 0 fewer asthma attacks & 0 fewer premature deaths in 2030."

Tom Nelson @tan123

This is ridiculous fraud. Real results of CO2-tweaking are 0 fewer asthma attacks & 0 fewer premature deaths in 2030 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/628283831104237569 …

12:49 PM - 3 Aug 2015

27 27 Retweets 6 6 likes

[Twitter, 8/3/15]

Steve Milloy Disputes That Carbon Is Harmful: "Ask A Plant." Steve Milloy disputed that carbon is a harmful pollutant by tweeting: "Obama CO2 announcement: Calls CO2 'harmful carbon pollution.' Ask a plant."

...

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/08/04/the-right-wing-medias-most-unhinged-reactions-t/204764

wiki

Kimberley A. Strassel (born July 24, 1972) is an author and member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. She writes a weekly conservative column, "Potomac Watch", which appears on Fridays.

[hide]

Biography

Strassel grew up in Buxton, Oregon, where she graduated in 1990 from Banks High School in nearby Banks.^[1] She graduated from Princeton University in 1994 with a B.A. in Public Policy and International Affairs. Before joining the Editorial Board she was a news assistant for the European edition of the WSJ in Brussels (1994–1996) and a staff writer covering technology for the WSJ Europe in London (1996–1999). She moved to New York in 1999 to cover real estate before quickly joining the editorial page as an assistant features editor. She became a senior editorial writer and member of the editorial board in 2005.

In 2001, Strassel was the first mainstream journalist to cover problems with Michael Bellesiles's Arming America. Strassel won an award for her work on the issue, when the concerns that Strassel raised turned out to be correct; Bellesiles lost his professorship at Emory University and had his Bancroft Prize revoked.

In 2006, Strassel co-wrote Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws (ISBN 0-7425-4545-8), which argues that government regulation interferes with marketplace initiatives to provide women with economic opportunity.

Strassel profiled Sarah Palin in a 2008 article entitled I Haven't Always Just Toed the Line.^[2] The article originally appeared in the Weekend Interview section of The Wall Street Journal on November 1, 2008.

In 2012, Strassel wrote an editorial in the WSJ that alleged the Obama campaign was targeting Frank L. VanderSloot, a national finance co-chair for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and a top campaign donor.^[3] Strassel's editorial was disputed by Rachel Maddow,^[4] Lewiston Morning Tribune editor Marty Trillhaase,^[5]and David Shere of Media Matters for America.^[6] In May 2013, Strassel reported that the IRS (not the Obama campaign) targeted conservatives, including Frank L. VanderSloot.^[7]

===

Kimberley A. Strassel is a member of Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, based in Washington. Since 2007 she has written the Potomac Watch column. She joined the editorial page in 1999 as an assistant editorial features editor for The Wall Street Journal after covering real estate for Journal's news pages and spending four years in London writing about technology for the Wall Street Journal Europe. She joined the Editorial Board in 2005. Ms. Strassel is a graduate of Princeton University.

The IRS’s Ugly Business as Usual

‘How much has really changed?’ a judge asks. Answer: not much. The scandal goes on.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

May 19, 2016 7:27 p.m. ET

Amid the drama that is today’s presidential race, serious subjects are getting short shrift. No one is happier about this than Barack Obama. And no agency withi

Exxon’s Inquisitors Feel the Heat

Court filings reveal the true aim of this ‘fraud’ case: silencing conservatives.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey with other state attorneys general announcing an effort to combat climate change, March 29. ENLARGE

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

June 16, 2016 6:44 p.m. ET

354 COMMENTS

The first thing to know about the crusade against Exxon by state attorneys general is that it isn’t about the law. The second thing to know is that it isn’t even about Exxon. What these liberal prosecutors really want is to shut down a universe of their most-hated ideological opponents.

That became startlingly clear this week, with Exxon’s latest filing in federal court. The oil company revealed that it has received another subpoena for documents, this one from Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. But Ms. Healey, whose fervor exceeds her political sense, gives away the game.

The 17 attorneys general participating in this cause have always been careful to identify Exxon as their only target. It’s easier to accuse a big, bad oil company of nefarious deeds, so they make the bogus claim that Exxon somehow “defrauded” the public and its shareholders by engaging in “climate denial.” All the better if they can beat Exxon into cutting a giant check to settle any future charges—a payoff for their states (and for the trial lawyers helping them).

But the Healey subpoena shows that Exxon is a front. The real target is a broad array of conservative activist groups that are highly effective at mobilizing the grass-roots and countering liberal talking points—and that therefore must (as the left sees things) be muzzled. This is clear from the crazy list of organizations Ms. Healey asked for information about in her subpoena. She demanded that Exxon turn over decades of correspondence with any of them.

Take Americans for Prosperity. AFP confirms it has never received a dime from Exxon. But its 2.3 million activists nationwide are highly effective in elections, and it receives funding from the left’s favorite boogeymen, Charles and David Koch.

Or, closer to home: Ms. Healey named the Beacon Hill Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Boston. My sources confirm Beacon Hill has also never seen Exxon dollars. But it is a perpetual thorn in the side of liberal Massachusetts politicians like Ms. Healey.

Also named: the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC doesn’t now, and hasn’t ever, taken a position on the climate.The group is, however, one of the most powerful forces in the country for free-market legislation, having written hundreds of model bills that states use in their efforts to reduce taxes, cut regulations and reform tort laws. Democratic activists have, for the past five years in particular, waged a vicious campaign to run ALEC out of business, and Ms. Healey is now doing her bit.

The same tactics were on display in a subpoena to Exxon from Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker. He appears to have cut-and-pasted from an anti-Exxon website maintained by Greenpeace, since his subpoena lists the same groups in pretty much the same order. The exercise was so sloppy that Mr. Walker named numerous organizations that have been defunct for years, listed several targets twice, and misidentified others.

The goal of the Exxon probe isn’t to protect consumers or help the environment. It’s a message: Oppose us, and we will marshal our terrifying government powers to intimidate and threaten you, to force you to spend millions defending yourself, to eat up the time you’d otherwise use speaking out.

MORE POTOMAC WATCH

Trump Can’t Wing It Forever June 10, 2016

Clinton’s Lawyer, Under Oath June 2, 2016

Trump Rakes the Clinton Muck May 26, 2016

The IRS’s Ugly Business as Usual May 19, 2016

The Exxon investigation is “pure harassment,” civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate told the Boston Herald this week. “It is outrageous for any law enforcement official,” he continued, “to be seeking to win this battle for minds by flexing law enforcement muscle and trying to shut up the other side.”

That goal is all the more clear given the dishonesty of the legal claim. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is pursuing Exxon under his state’s sweeping Martin Act, which covers securities fraud. Yet at a recent panel discussion in New York, Columbia Law Professor Merritt B. Fox noted that Exxon’s actions were irrelevant in a market already “well supplied with information about climate change.” He skewered Mr. Schneiderman for pursuing a case “so unlikely” to “be a winner.” This was even as he expressed solidarity with concerns about global warming.

The attorneys general are feeling so much pushback that Mr. Schneiderman felt compelled to give a speech last week delineating his own made-up limits on free speech. Groups that question his harassment of them are engaged in “First Amendment opportunism,” he said, and any right they claim is trumped, apparently, by his righteous, self-defined calling to pursue “fraud.” He clearly sent this memo to his persecutors-in-arms, since Ms. Healey was parroting the same lines this week in response to questions about her subpoena.

The Exxon campaign is only the latest in liberals’ broad, coordinated strategy to shut down conservatives. We’ve seen it in the IRS targeting, the Wisconsin John Doe probe, the campaign against ALEC, the harassment of conservative donors.And the only way to stop it is for targets to speak out—even louder.

Ms. Strassel is the author of “The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech,” out next week from Twelve. Write to kim@wsj.com.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/06/17/wsjs-kimberley-strassel-pushes-illogical-conspiracy-theory-about-exxon-climate-investigations/211024

The Wall Street Journal’seditorial board has tried every trick in the book to wrongly defend ExxonMobil against allegations that the company intentionally misled shareholders and the public about the science of climate change. Now one member of the editorial board is pushing yet another defense of Exxon so riddled with errors that it completely falls apart upon a basic review of the facts.

In a June 16 column, the Journal’s Kimberley Strassel alleged that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s recent subpoena of ExxonMobil shows that the attorneys general investigating Exxon aren’t really concerned with whether the company’s climate science denial constitutes fraud. Rather, Strassel declared, “The real target is a broad array of conservative activist groups that are highly effective at mobilizing the grass-roots and countering liberal talking points.”

As supposed proof, Strassel pointed to Healey’s request for Exxon’s communications with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Strassel asserted that Healey targeted ALEC because it is “one of the most powerful forces in the country for free-market legislation,” an argument she based on the false premise that “ALEC doesn’t now, and hasn’t ever, taken a position on the climate.”

The truth is that ALEC has crafted model legislation that misrepresents the science of climate change and hosted prominent climate science deniers at its conferences, and ALEC officials – including CEO Lisa Nelson – have refused to acknowledge or outright denied the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels and other human activities are causing climate change. ALEC, a corporate front group that connects fossil fuel industry executives with legislators to serve industry interests, has also pushed model bills that would mandate teaching climate science denial in public schools. So it’s not hard to understand why Healey would want to know whether Exxon and ALEC have teamed up to undermine climate science.

Strassel similarly claimed that Healey targeted the oil billionaire Koch brothers’ front group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) because “its 2.3 million activists nationwide are highly effective in elections.” This must be true, Strassel argued, because “AFP confirms it has never received a dime from Exxon.”

However, as Climate Hawks explained in response to a Daily Caller article that made the same claim, “Americans for Prosperity's predecessor Citizens for A Sound Economy got hundreds of thousands from ExxonMobil,” meaning that “the group in question simply went by another name when it was funded by ExxonMobil.”

Moreover, it remains an open question whether Exxon is continuing to funnel money to AFP via DonorsTrust and the Donors Capital Fund, dark money groups largely backed by the Koch brothers. In October, InsideClimate News reported that a group of Democratic senators wrote a letter to Exxon “questioning Exxon's contributions to Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, which provide a conduit between well-heeled contributors and various conservative public policy organizations, including many at the forefront of climate science denial.” InsideClimate News further noted that the senators cited research from Robert Brulle of Drexel University, who provided evidence that Exxon may have engaged in an effort to “simply reroute its support” of climate denial organizations:

Brulle is a leading sociologist who has been published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature on the climate denial movement.

In material supplementing one of his studies, Brulle documented Exxon donations directly to climate denial groups such as the Heartland Institute, up until about 2008. At about the time Exxon scaled back its giving to those groups, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund stepped up their donations to them.

Americans for Prosperity “frequently provides a platform for climate contrarian statements,” as the Union of Concerned Scientists has noted. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation has received approximately $23 million in combined contributions from Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund since 2008.

https://www.amazon.com/Intimidation-Game-Left-Silencing-Speech/dp/1455591882

From Kim Strassel-one of the preeminent political columnists writing today and member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board-comes an insightful, alarming look at how the Left, once the champion of civil liberties, is today orchestrating a coordinated campaign to bully Americans out of free speech.

For nearly 40 years, Washington and much of the American public have held up disclosure and campaign finance laws as ideals, and the path to cleaner and freer elections. This book will show, through first-hand accounts, how both have been hijacked by the Left as weapons against free speech and free association, becoming the most powerful tools of those intent on silencing their political opposition. THE INTIMIDATION GAME provides a chilling expose of political scare tactics and overreach, including:

How Citizens United set off a wave of liberal harassment against conservative politicians
The targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS
How Wisconsin prosecutors, state AGs, and a Democratic Congress shut down political activists and businesses
The politicization by the Obama administration of a host of government agencies including the FEC, FCC and the SEC

Timed to arrive at the height of the 2016 presidential season, THE INTIMIDATION GAME will shine a much-needed light on how liberal governance and the Democratic machine bullies the political process.

Review

"Progressives' objective is to extend government's regulatory reach ever-deeper into society's dynamics. Strassel reveals how fast and how far this project has been expanded to include an especially sinister objective: Empowering government to control political campaign speech-speech about the government's composition and behavior. Her frightening reports come from many fronts in this war on America's open society. This book is a fire bell in a darkening night."?George F. Will

"There have been a lot of good books of late decrying the increasingly repressive climate towards free speech. But none have connected the dots between the Obama White House, Congressional Democrats, and the spider web of 'grassroots' organizations the way Kim Strassel does in THE INTIMIDATION GAME. It is required reading for those who want to know what's behind the supposedly spontaneous daily outrages we see every day."?Jonah Goldberg

"Public shaming encouraged by leading political figures. Pre-dawn police raids. Federal agencies targeting groups and individuals because of their political views. It's hard to believe these things are happening-and taking place with increasing frequency-in the United States. But they are. And in this searing indictment of the systematic attempt of the political left to shut down political debates they cannot win-Kimberly Strassel provides the often-horrifying details. THE INTIMIDATION GAME is a shocking and assiduously well-reported chronicle of the illiberal tactics of the new progressives-and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand American politics today."?Stephen Hayes

"Strassel draws a timely, convincing, and alarming picture of liberal governance and a

Democratic machine that's eager to bully resistant citizens."?Publishers Weekly

"An eye-opening lesson in the law of unintended consequences: where "a vast new disclosure regime" intended to curb corruption has spawned a corruption all its own."?Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Kimberley Strassel is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, based in Washington. Since 2007 she has written the "Potomac Watch" column and has worked for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, London, and New York. An Oregon native, Ms. Strassel is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Virginia with her three children.

Pre-order The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech for your Kindle today.

Hardcover: 416 pages

Publisher: Twelve (June 21, 2016)

Language: English.

1/16

4. WSJ Op-Ed ClaimsFinding That Bacon Causes CancerIs Part Of Climate Change Conspiracy

The Wall Street Journal published a Nov. 9 op-ed, The Climate Agenda Behind the Bacon Scare, which was co-authored by Jeff Stier and Julie Kelly of the oil industry-backedNational Center for Public Policy Research and Heartland Institute, respectively. Stier and Kelly asserted that the World Health Organization’s announcement linking red and processed meats to cancer “seems particularly well timed” to coincide with the United Nations climate negotiations in Paris, and baselessly claimed that “[t]he widely publicized warning about meat isn’t about health. It’s about fighting global warming.”

==TAG IMPORT

===

my how the mighty have fallen:

Editor's Note:The news last week that Buzzfeed had deleted posts critical of advertisers got some of us at ProPublica wondering about any instances when news organizations stood up to advertiser pressure. As it turns out, ProPublica president Richard Tofel wrote a whole chapter of a book about one of those cases: In 1954, the Wall Street Journal and its publisher, Barney Kilgore, confronted General Motors. The little-remembered incident helped establish the notion that news organizations could and should preserve their independence from advertisers.

Here is an adaptation from the book, "Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism."

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-time-a-newspaper-stared-down-the-countrys-largest-advertiser

There is no death for even the most long-debunked climate myths, especially on the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And the only certainty about carbon taxes — or indeed any serious climate action — is that the Journal will try to undercut their moral urgency by giving life to dead myths.

In the case of the Journal’s Saturday piece, “Climate Science Is Not Settled,” we get the umpteenth error-riddled rehash of denier talking points — to the effect that the remaining uncertainties in climate science undermine the case for strong action.

The piece is by former BP chief scientist and former Department of Energy official, Steven Koonin, but this dangerously error-riddled piece is much more BP than DOE — and its bizarre and unjustified conclusions have already beendebunked by leading climate scientists.

In fact, it has long been known that the reverse is true: Uncertainty is a major reason climate action is so urgent. Three years ago, a major climate-assessment study of just the rainfall impacts to this country conducted by Sandia National Laboratory concluded:

“We want to reemphasize that the methods of this study reveal how compelling risk derives from uncertainty, not certainty. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the risk. It is the uncertainty associated with climate change that validates the need to act protectively and proactively.”

As a side note, Koonin was in charge of “coordinating and overseeing research across the DOE” when this major scientific report from a DOE lab came out.

Uncertainty increases the moral necessity of climate action for two main reasons. First, virtually all the large-scale uncertainty associated with climate inaction concerns how catastrophic the worst-case scenario is. That’s because inaction makes the chances of a best-case scenario — tolerable or manageable impacts — very small.

Climate science makes clear that “inaction eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether future warming will be catastrophic.” Worse, inaction introduces the very real risk that we might render large parts of the currently inhabited and arable land of the world unfit for human life and/or crops, reducing the carrying capacity of the planet far below its current level of 7 billion, let alone the 9+ billion people we are projected to have post-2050.

But uncertainty at the smaller-scale level is also a key reason we must act. Critics of climate models like Koonin often note that they aren’t able to make accurate predictions of local weather. That’s true, and unfortunately that makes waiting and adapting a far more costly proposition.

We know that global warming makes previously rare, city-devastating deluges increasingly common. We know that devastating deluges of the kind that have swamped Boulder and Nashville and upstate New York and Pakistan are becoming more frequent and more intense over time thanks to climate change. We know the same is true for storm surges like Superstorm Sandy’s that flattened so much of the New York and New Jersey coast.

But we can’t predict exactly where these super storms will strike. So that means if we don’t spend the money to minimize them from happening somewhere, we have to spend money preparing for them everywhere. And that is very, very expensive.

Relatedly, it is a very well known that humans dislike uncertainty, especially uncertainty surrounding the possibility of catastrophic risks. That’s why we own fire insurance, even though the chances of a fire are very small. It’s a key reason we own health insurance, especially catastrophic health insurance. We don’t know who is going to get catastrophically sick; we only know that if it were to happen to us, it could easily be a life-ruining, bankruptcy-inducing event.

That’s a key reason uncertainty motivates so much human action.

[cartoon resk assess]

And it’s a key reason inaction on climate change is so immoral. It is one thing to take a potentially catastrophic risk upon yourself — smoking, eating more and more unhealthy foods — but to impose a potentially catastrophic risk on billions of people who contributed little or nothing to the problem is among the most immoral acts imaginable. That’s particularly true when the prospective damage is irreversible over a time span of centuries and the cost of even very strong action is negligible if not zero (or less!).

Koonin’s Wall Street Journal piece itself is an embarrassing collection of errors, denier talking points and hypocrisy. You can find fuller debunkings by scientists here and here. But a few whoppers are worth highlighting.

Koonin claims that “the impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.”

No. Not even close! In fact, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which Koonin repeatedly mentions but apparently never read closely) states clearly that the “best estimate is that humans are responsible for all of the warming we have suffered since 1950.”

As Dr. Michael Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, explains in his reply to Koonin:

The fact is that the actual peer-reviewed scientific research shows that (a) the rate of warming over the past century is unprecedented as far back as the 20,000 years paleoclimate scientists are able to extend the record and (b) that warming canONLY be explained by human influences.

Indeed, it is the RATE of warming that presents such risk to human civilization and our environment.

Climate scientists Michael Oppenheimer and Kevin Trenberth also debunk Koonin, noting, “Warming is well beyond natural climate variability and projected rates of change are potentially faster than ecosystems, farmers and societies can adapt to without major disruptions.”

They add that Koonin’s main conclusions — that climate science only justifies increased R&D into renewable energy and “cost-effective” energy efficiency — “ignore decades of research results.”

Bottom Line: Although Koonin was technically in charge of overseeing science at DOE for years, he has chosen to ignore decades of research, including research done at DOE during his tenure.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/22/3570280/wall-street-journal-climate-inaction/

Suzanne Somers is still an idiot, and the WSJ prints her error-ridden Obamacare hitjob anyway.

While Thighmaster spokeswoman Suzanne Somers has matured since her hit TV show days, her plumpers and politics have pretty much ossified. Her enlightened take on the Affordable Care Act appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week, concluding that it’s “a greater Ponzi scheme than that pulled off by Bernie Madoff.” She wrote 535 hysterical words, in which Lenin came up in addition to Madoff, on the topic of this dreaded “socialized medicine.” By the next day, the Journal had published nearly a fifth as many words in corrections.

But it did not correct the “Ponzi scheme” assertion, which was based on flimsy anecdotes about relatives who had bad experiences with Canadian doctors, and how Somers is hearing on the news that everyone’s premium is doubling and tripling. (Any guesses as to which so-called news channel she watches?)

This piece of rocket science appeared in WSJ’s "The Experts" section, which bills itself as “an exclusive group of industry, academic and cultural thought leaders who weigh in on the latest debates.”

This will definitely be our go-to section for expert analysis henceforth.

WSJ 2

One Fox contributor called out RFK Jr.’s “lifetime spreading misinformation.” Fox's evening lineup then gushed over him.

Newspaper front pages continue to bury Trump’s former chief-of-staff saying the former president is a fascist who praised Hitler

Fox’s Special Report covered this rigged “study” as if it were straight news

Committee to Unleash Prosperity rewrites death numbers in red states with a fake statistic: “Metabolic-health adjustment”

Right-wing media denied the existence of the climate emergency

Conservatives also downplayed the deadly extreme heat

Right-wing media also attacked the Biden administration for considering a climate emergency declaration

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

1) The 10-year-old American Chemistry Council-funded study that looked at 84 reusable bags in two states and found no disease-causing bacteria

2) The study that looked at 30 reusable bags and said essentially the same thing

3) The study that looked at one reusable bag that someone had literally vomited next to in a bathroom and then gave to a group of children.

No evidence, no problem

New York Times Defends Hiring Climate Science Denier

Three Major Newspapers Published Climate Science Denial On Opinion Pages, Led By The Wall Street Journal

Newspapers Gave Key Climate And Energy Misinformers Significant Exposure

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